You'll Never Guess How Taylor Swift Keeps Her Backup Dancers From Leaking Her Music

With the internet, musicians have a really hard time keeping their new music under wraps before it's officially released. The bigger the star is, the more people there are trying to make a buck off getting their hands on an unreleased-track, so artists sometimes have to get creative. Taylor Swift's rule for keeping new music a secret is pretty damn genius. Other industry peeps should take notes.

Swift is one of the biggest names in pop music, which puts a big target on her tracks that are in production. Therefore, Swift is extra careful about keeping her music under lock and key. But how do you keep music a secret while you are making a music video? Swift has a simple fix: she doesn't let anyone on set hear the track, according to BuzzFeed.

On Friday, Feb. 9, Swift released a behind-the-scenes video form the making of the "End Game" music video off her latest album, Reputation. Most of the video is just Ed Sheeran and Swift hanging out poking fun at each other. They also get into the conception of the song and how it came together and Swift learns that Born On the 4th of July is an actual film. But the most important part, really, is once they get on set and it's revealed that Swift has her dancers dancing to no music.

"I commend [my dancers] fully," she says. "Because they've been pretending there's music playing when there's not. The pop star then opens her palm to reveal tiny earpieces, "I have these in my ears. They've been like dancing to a click track. It's incredibly hard work."

If you don't know what a click track is, it's basically just audio cues that go to the beat of the song so everyone can stay in sync and dance to the rhythm. I've never been much of a dancer, well, unless you count a two-year stint in pre-teen pop, but pretending to dance to a track that isn't actually there seems pretty tough. But Swift's rather "out there" approach to keeping her dancers from leaking her tracks isn't all that surprising.

While Sheeran and Swift were working on "End Game" she didn't even let him listen to the track. Yeah, that's right. Should I repeat that? Instead, Swift had someone fly out to bring a locked briefcase to Sheeran to play him the song on an iPad and then the guy would lock it back up and fly back. Sheeran told Just Jared in Feb. 2017,

She would never send new songs, no… I hear them but it has to be with her… I remember when I did a song with her for her album, I was in San Francisco, and they sent someone with a locked briefcase with an iPad and one song on it, and they flew to San Francisco, and played the song I've done with her… And they asked if I like it and I was like, 'Yeah,' and then they took it back, that's how I hear it.

First off, I'd like to know who this one dude is who just carried around a nondescript briefcase with Swift's jams in them. But more importantly, what? Sheeran is a close friend of Swift. She even points out that Sheeran met his now fiancé, Cherry Seaborn, at her house. Is she just worried about people intercepting it or hacking if she sends it over the internet? Okay, I guess that is valid.

Honestly, I get all the fuss over Swift wanting to keep her tracks on the way way down low until she decided to release them, but what is really at stake? Another publicity stunt? Some money? I don't know, I mean come on, your dancers would look much less awkward with actual music instead of swaying to George Michael Bluth banging on his wooden block.