American singer/songwriter Taylor Swift is an influential figure in popular culture and the subject of worldwide public interest. She is one of the world’s best-selling music artists with estimated global sales of 200 million records.
Seven of her albums have opened with over one million pre-sales in a week. She has appeared on lists of history’s greatest artists from publications such as Rolling Stone, Billboard, and Forbes. She finished last year with the accolade of being named Time ‘Person of the Year 2023’.
Everywhere she goes, her fans are right there – in such numbers, and with such devotion that they often make a sizeable contribution to the local economy of her tour venues.
Dynamic looks at the global phenomenon of ‘Swiftnomics’.
Taylor Alison Swift was born on December 13th 1989, in West Reading, Pennsylvania, USA; her parents, Scott and Andrea, named her after legendary singer-songwriter James Taylor. She spent her early years on a Christmas tree farm in Pennsylvania, and her summers at her family’s holiday home in neighbouring New Jersey where she occasionally performed acoustic songs at a local coffee shop.
As a child, she performed in Berks Youth Theatre Academy productions and traveled regularly to New York City for vocal and acting lessons. Her first music love was country music, especially the works of artists such as Shania Twain, Patsy Cline, LeAnn Rimes, and the Dixie Chicks, and she spent weekends as a child performing at local festivals and events.
RECORDING
At the age of 14, her family moved to Nashville, Tennessee - home of country music. Taylor signed with Scott Borchetta’s Big Machine Records in 2005; Taylor’s father, a stockbroker, purchased a 3% stake in the fledgling record company for $120,000. She soon recorded her first album, entitled ‘Taylor Swift’, writing or co-writing all of the songs.
Released in October 2006, ‘Taylor Swift’ peaked at number five on the US Billboard 200, on which it spent 157 weeks — the longest stay on the chart by any release in the US in the 2000s decade. Taylor became the first female country music artist to write or co-write every track on a platinum-certified (one million sales or downloads) debut album.
She spent the next decade writing and recording a series of million-selling albums, including ‘1989’, ‘Fearless’, ‘Reputation’, ‘Red’ and others. With every album came a growing fanbase, and more praise and accolades.
Taylor Swift left Big Machine after recording Reputation in 2017, signing with Republic Records the next year. On her departure from Big Machine, she wanted to buy the copyright to her master recordings, but agreeable terms couldn’t be met. They were ultimately sold to a company called Shamrock Holdings, who paid a reported $300m for them.
Despite many attempts to do so, Taylor never bought the rights to the master recordings of that music. Instead, she embarked on a huge project to re-record her own ‘Taylor’s Version’ of her albums in 2021. She has been able to do this because she retained the copyright in the music and the lyrics, which gives her the right to re-record the songs.
Swift has managed her re-recording process so effectively that her fans are now exclusively streaming ‘Taylor’s Version’ of her tracks, ensuring that she gets the credit and revenue from their streams.
As an example, on Taylor’s original Red album, she released ‘All Too Well’, and it was streamed around 39.4 million times. On Red (Taylor’s Version), she released a longer version of the same song, and this has been streamed around 450 million times – and it’s a ten-minute song.
She has been able to respond in this way because of her global reputation and the unrivalled engagement that she has with her fanbase. It seems unlikely that other artists will be as successful if they try to take the same steps, so ensuring that artists understand what rights they have and, importantly, what they are signing away at the start of their careers is essential.
She has won admiration from so many corners of business – inside and outside of music – for fighting back at the monolithic, often misogynistic music industry. She – as all artists do - wanted control of her creative output, and eventually won that battle, though it took a lot out of her.
No woman, with maybe the exception of Dolly Parton, has stuck two fingers up at the industry in such a manner, and sought to wrest complete creative control from faceless suits – without selling themselves short or being a puppet to mediocrity or corporate interests.
SWIFTNOMICS
Her fans – ‘Swifties’ – are crushingly loyal, and she can count several celebrities among them; not least of which, Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, who appeared in her 2020 music video - ‘The Man’.
While her jump in popularity can be traced back to her 2017 Reputation album, her latest tour has seen the effect of her fanbase go off the charts.
Since 2023, Taylor Swift has been on her Eras Tour. The tour is creating all kinds of waves, financial and seismic (literally, in the case of the latter – a recent show in the US was measured at 2.3 by seismologists). It was estimated to have boosted UK spending by almost £1bn in 2024, with more than a million fans seeing her perform live.
She commands large audiences on stage without having to rely on extravagant dance routines. According to V magazine’s Greg Krelenstein, she possesses, “a rare gift of turning a stadium spectacle into an intimate setting”, irrespective of whether she is “plucking a guitar or leading an army of dancers.”
Spanning six continents, the tour hit the UK for 15 dates in June and August, with fans spending an average of £848 on tickets, travel, accommodation and other assorted merchandise, according to Barclays. The story is largely the same in her home country.
The Eras Tour came on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic during which personal savings of US households hit a record high and the tourism industry suffered significantly.
When tickets for the Eras Tour went on sale last year, it crashed websites and led to sold-out hotels in host cities around the world.
While Swift fans aren’t representative of any given national population, they’ve been credited with exemplifying that consumers were willing to spend their pandemic savings on tourism and entertainment despite fears of a potential recession.
Eras Tour attendees – averaging around 54,000 fans per concert during the first leg of the US tour – travelled to cities hosting Swift’s concerts and, like their UK counterparts, spent their money on hotels, transportation, food, merchandise and more, again, helping to revive local tourism.
One study showed that the average spend for an Eras Tour attendee in the US is $1,327 (£1,023) – higher than UK fans’ expenditure.
After the singer-songwriter held three concerts in Chicago in June 2023, Illinois Governor, J.B. Pritzker, and leading tourism leaders announced that the state had broken its hotel revenue record thanks in part to Taylor’s visit. Indeed, every host city around the world that has hosted Taylor Swift since her tour started in 2023 has noticed a dramatic spike in its local economy while she is resident. The tourism figures soon return to normal once her entourage has left town.
Swift’s popular success is not just confined to the world of music. Her mere presence at American football games to watch her boyfriend Travis Kelce has been credited with raising NFL viewing figures.
Dr Peter Brooks, chief behavioural scientist at Barclays, said: “When it comes to cultural icons like Taylor Swift – like we saw with Elvis and Beatlemania in the 50s and 60s – supporters have such a strong connection to the artist and to the rest of the fandom that the desire to spend becomes even more powerful.
“For non-fans, £848 may seem like an enormous amount to splash out on a concert, but for Eras Tour ticket-holders, every pound they spend is an investment in the memories they’ll create.”
FORBES LIST
Swift herself entered the Forbes rich list for the first time in April this year, having attained billionaire status in October 2023, becoming the world’s first musician to achieve the milestone solely based on their songs and performances.
Forbes said there were a record 2,781 billionaires for 2024. The figure is 141 more than last year and 26 more than the previous record set in 2021. It added the elite were richer than ever - with a collective wealth of $14.2tn (£11.3tn).
Taylor entered the rich list after achieving megastar status. She stole the show at this year’s Grammy Awards, becoming the first performer to win the prize for album of the year four times. Her album 1989 (Taylor’s Version) was also the best-selling vinyl LP of 2023.
PHILANTHROPY
Swift’s philanthropy is legendary. She was noted for her generosity very early in her career, way before the megastardom status she enjoys today. Her largesse is from the heart; not some PR playbook.
The list of beneficiaries is as deep as it is wide. Many charities in Tennessee have received her donations, especially those communities caught in the annual hurricanes and floods which sweep through the deep south at the end of every summer.
In 2015, the international organisation ‘Do Something’ ranked her top of their ‘Gone Good’ List for donations and generosity. During the Eras Tour, Swift donated to food banks at every stop. Her donation to a food bank in Cardiff provided emergency food parcels to 925 people. She donated to the charity after she performed in Cardiff in June. Rachel Biggs, the CEO of Cardiff Foodbank, said they are incredibly grateful to the singer “for shining a light on the global issue of poverty”. The charity said her donation allowed them to buy one and a half articulated lorries full of food.
LEGACY
It’s highly likely that the true extent of her legacy has yet to be known, although there are several chapters written already. She is 35 next month, is on tour, and has – at least her fanbase certainly hope so – several more albums to record, and two of her own albums to re-record.
Her songs, one fan said, reach out on the most mundane level of people’s everyday existences, yet with perfect pitch, grace, and to so many. She is an inspiration to women and girls across so many cultures. Her music, the same Swiftie said, is absolutely brilliant (subjective, but heartfelt). She connects with her fans on so many levels, musically, emotionally, spiritually and - and this is the clincher - personally.
Since the days of MySpace, Taylor Swift has had personal conversations online with people in her fanbase; a discourse that can make that one fan feel like they are the only fan; a special fan. Her approach to managing her brand – and the loyalty that instills – and business ventures provide a fresh lens through which to view economic principles.
And that is her strength.
Her accolades include 14 Grammy Awards, a Primetime Emmy Award, 40 American Music Awards, 39 Billboard Music Awards, and 23 MTV Video Music Awards; she has won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year, the MTV Video Music Award for Video of the Year, and the IFPI Global Recording Artist of the Year a record four times each.
It is now approaching 70 years since ‘Rock & Roll’, or popular music first became known. In this time, no female – certainly not in the English-speaking pop world – has ever had the adoration or power Taylor Swift currently enjoys. Her current popularity is unrivalled; in music terms, she is up there historically with Beatles and Elvis; in social and cultural terms, she has more sway than almost every well-intentioned public icon on the planet.
This sway is not just in the music business, but across so many different cultures and societies. In the history of pop, Madonna may come close to holding this sway, one might postulate. Ish.
But every Swiftie will argue with that.
