Is Taylor Swift a Music Genius or a Ruthless Business Woman?
The time has come I should talk about Taylor Swift!
Unless you’ve lived under a rock for the past 15 years or more, you must have heard of Taylor Swift. She’s omnipresent, from music charts to a stadium near you and even mentioned on relevant business publications.
Her "Eras Tour" is on track to become the highest-grossing tour in history, and it's already one of the largest pop culture phenomena since, maybe the Beatles?
She's definitely at her peak, 18 years after releasing her first album, and is probably the biggest pop star alive.
Yet, can you name five Taylor Swift’s songs?
If you managed to do so, it’s likely that at least two or three out of your five are among the top 8 most viewed on her YouTube channel.
What do these eight songs have in common?
- They’re old. They were all released between 2012 and 2017.
- Four out of eight come from one album, “1989”, released in 2014. Blank Space, Shake It Off, Bad Blood and Style were all part of “1989”.
It is hard to evaluate what is the most successful song or album by a recording artist, but YouTube views and official album sales figures can help.
"Blank Space”, from the album "1989", is Swift's most viewed video on YouTube. "1989" is her best-selling album with 10.6 million units sold worldwide.
Even in my mind, "1989" is likely her most popular album, with hits I can still sing along to.
Google Trends confirms that until recently, the "1989" era was the most popular. After 2014, the trend declines consistently for several years, only to recover around spring 2023 when the Eras Tour began.
The trend shown above mirrors the one in the previous chart about album sales. After "1989", both album sales and “popularity” declined.
The Economist even argues that in 2019, Ms. Swift was just a couple of (weak) albums away from a Las Vegas residency, the infamous musicians’ grave.
Then something changed.
During the pandemic Swift was exceptionally productive. While she would normally release an album every two or three years, since 2020 she has released four original albums, plus four re-recordings. Her last album’s special edition, “The Tortured Poets Department: Anthology” features as many as 31 tracks!
However, can you name one or more of these songs? Unless you're a Swiftie, there aren't many chances you can. I can't.
This brings me to the main point of this article.
Taylor Swift’s latest success spike, which we can easily dub “Swiftmania”, has little to do with music and more to do with savvy commercial acumen and ruthless business practices.
Her business skills are well known in the industry. You might even hear economists discussing "Swiftonomics", "Taylornomics", or "Swift Inc", to describe the characteristics of her incredible commercial success.
Like many successful CEOs she performed a turnaround during the pandemic.
After massive hits like "Shake It Off" and "Blank Space", Swift didn't manage to replicate the same success with her following albums, "Reputation" and "Lover".
I remember I was working for the largest book and music retailer in Ireland at the time Reputation was released in 2017 and word spread among colleagues that Taylor Swift’s new album + magazine + special edition would have made our Christmas. Not only this didn’t happen, but the bestsellers of that season were a book about the Irish Revolution and a book about Trump. Very far from anything Taylor-related.
I'm sure Swift's releases are now among my former employer's bestsellers.
So what happened?
As often occurs in business, and especially in politics, she played the victim. She went even further by specifically portraying herself as a woman victim in a male-dominated music industry. This resonated strongly in the post-pandemic world, especially among her mostly young female fans.
What was she the victim of?
When a record label or any other investor finances the production of an album (which can be very expensive, costing up to hundreds of thousands of dollars), they usually keep ownership of the master recordings. Master recordings are the actual recordings of the songs, not to be confused with the songs themselves, whose ownership and copyright is regulated differently.
Like a venture capitalist in tech, a record label takes the risk of producing a debut album and keeps a stake in it (either full or partial ownership of the recordings) to profit from its potential success. It’s common practice.
That is what Big Machine Records did in the early 2000s when it produced and promoted Taylor’s first six albums.
The problem is that the owner of a master recording can do almost anything with it, as long as it doesn’t harm the artist, in case the two entities don’t match. They can resell it like any other asset. Recent history is full of examples: Bruce Springsteen, Katy Perry, and Justin Bieber all sold their stake in their master recordings to cash in millions.
On June 30th, 2019 it was announced that Big Machine Records and its music catalogue was sold to a fund owned by Scooter Braun, a successful music entrepreneur who discovered and launched Justin Bieber.
Taylor strongly disliked Braun, she called him a “bully”. She couldn’t stand the fact that he owned her recordings. Therefore, she wanted them back.
Now, it’s common for successful artists to eventually buy their masters back when they can finally afford them. Rihanna did so in 2016 and Dua Lipa in 2023, just to mention some fellow pop stars. But neither of them made a PR case out of it. Probably because they managed to finalise the purchase, while Swift never has.
Taylor publicly complained in 2019 that Big Machine, and later Braun, refused to sell her the masters. The real story seems to be more complex, as explained by The Economist.
Big Machine offered Swift a renewal of their contract, which was due to expire in 2018. The new terms would have signed Swift for several years and given her ownership of her first six albums’ masters in return. She didn’t find the deal fair and left the label instead, thereby giving up the chance to regain ownership of her catalogue.
Subsequently, Braun reportedly offered Swift her masters for $300 million. She apparently declined, possibly because she couldn’t afford it at the time.
Swift is now a billionaire, especially thanks to her "Eras Tour," but in 2019 her net worth was estimated to be around $325 million. It has skyrocketed since then.
She would go on TV shows to explain how she was a victim of this situation, often hinting at a dark, male-dominated music industry. She would use terms like "bully," "aggression," and "strip of life’s work" (similar to stripping of clothes, I guess). Not by coincidence, the years 2018-2020 were also the peak of the Me Too movement. She managed to control the narrative at the right time and guide her fans in her favour.
The same happened several other times when she showed ruthless business behaviour but always kept the fans on her side, turning them against others.
For example, her Eras Tour tickets are extremely high-priced, with people reportedly paying several hundred dollars/euros for regular tickets and even thousands for second-hand ones. Such high prices are also determined by the practice of dynamic pricing, which is very common for airlines but definitely not common for live events. Swift was certainly happy to use dynamic pricing and to set a high floor price. She also decided to sell as many tickets as possible in one go in autumn 2022 to make a big splash and secure some sold-out shows in advance. This caused Ticketmaster to go down due to high demand, leaving many fans stranded. In both instances, she managed to divert fans’ anger towards Ticketmaster, which they saw as a monopolist taking advantage of them. In fact, it might have been the opposite.
Because of dynamic pricing, it’s hard to establish the average price paid for an Eras Tour ticket, but estimates from Bloomberg say it’s around $250, one of the highest ticket prices among pop star peers.
Even before the Eras Tour, Taylor's shows were already among the priciest, as Bloomberg reports.
In early 2024, when Universal Music Group, Swift’s current label, fell out with TikTok over royalty payments, all of Universal’s songs were removed from the social media platform.
But Taylor was planning to release her “The Tortured Poets Department” album soon and couldn’t afford to be left out of TikTok, today's biggest music promotion machine.
Thanks to her bargaining power, she could bypass the Universal boycott and bring her music back to TikTok shortly after the ban. Other Universal artists like Ariana Grande had to wait another month for the dispute to be resolved.
Wasn't she the paladin of artists justice?
Universal boycotted TikTok because of low royalty payments (which is bad for artists too), the same reason why Swift boycotted Spotify in 2014 and removed all her catalogue from the streaming platform. (brought it back in 2017)
I have nothing against resolute business practices, but this doesn't align with the image the pop star projects to her fans.
Her business "ruthlessness" seems to date back to her early days, when her father, a Merrill Lynch veteran banker, was managing her career.
Daniel Dymtrow, who previously managed Britney Spears, discovered Swift and started working with her in 2003. He was instrumental in her success and negotiated the deal with Big Machine Records, which produced and released her first six albums, including the “1989” hits.
Taylor’s father reportedly wrote Dymtrow in an email: “I always tell you but thank you so much for making our lives magical. We wouldn’t be in Nashville if it wasn’t for you.” However, he left him stranded with pennies once the deal with Big Machine was done, apparently scheming behind his back with Borchetta, Big Machine owner. Swift's father reportedly wrote to Borchetta: “Enough with the Dymtrow. You asked me to break both his legs, wrap him in chains and throw him in the lake. I did.”
Dymtrow eventually sued the Swifts for “unjust enrichment” and settled out of court. God knows how much he was paid to settle.
Now that I've stated the facts, I want to express my personal views.
Taylor Swift's music career peaked in 2014 with her “1989” album, which contained some undisputed great pop hits. However, after that, there wasn't much else. The other day, I listened to her latest albums and struggled to tell when one song was ending and a new one was starting. I believe her business acumen makes up for a lack of musical inventiveness. I would add that her business skills also make up for a lack of vocal talent compared to colleagues like Ariana Grande, Rihanna, Beyonce, or even Katy Perry. This shouldn't surprise. Madonna before her also wasn't known to be a great singer. However, Madonna unlike Taylor, was able to artistically evolve and explore new creative solutions and sounds with each album until at least her late 40s. This can hardly be said of Swift, who, with some exceptions, has been playing the same song for almost 20 years. When the formula works, why change it, just like CocaCola.
Also, the fact that she plays the role of a female hero is ironic.
“Looking for a man in finance, 6’5’, blue eyes.” Taylor is the female equivalent of that. Tall, long blonde hair, bright blue eyes, white upper-class American. She had romantic relationships with tens of famous handsome celebrities, from Harry Styles to John Mayer. Can she be more stereotypical than that?
And yet, her current public image embodies women's struggles and uniqueness. She empowers them to live on their own terms, which, ironically, also means spending hundreds of dollars to see her shows.
It is this exact image, carefully strategised with marketing craft, that made her turnaround possible and turned her into the huge star and billionaire she is today.
But I have to give her credit for one thing: she’s the first female billionaire who made her fortune solely from music. Rihanna is also a billionaire but made most of her fortune from her beauty business rather than from music. I think it's a great achievement that should be celebrated by music fans like myself.
On the other hand, you might see the glass as half-empty by saying that if this is how you make it in music, then I prefer the likes of Rihanna, who retired from music before it was too late.
PS.
I’m clearly a Rihanna, Madonna and now Ariana fan, some views might be biased :)
