Eventually, Stipe revealed to Antonoff and Healy that he was at Electric Lady working on his first solo record. (Healy responded with a drawn-out and reverent four-letter word.) Stipe had no qualms about sharing how tough the process had been so far, and how slow-going. Later he’d tell me: “I’m wildly insecure. I have impostor syndrome to the [expletive] max.” Sometimes Instagram served him clips of R.E.M. concerts, and he wondered: Where did it come from, the audacity to do that in front of tens of thousands of people? He told Antonoff and Healy, “It’s hard to be in competition with your former self.”

He said this with disarming sweetness. Antonoff tried to buck him up. He explained that, when he’s making something, he finds he just needs a few songs he’s proud of to make the entire project start to feel sufficiently sturdy. “You can wear them as armor,” he said.

But Stipe disagreed — definitively. He could remember, as a kid, adoring certain records, then hitting some total stinker somewhere on Side B and not being able to forgive the band for it.

For him, one weak song could ruin a whole album. It stained everything else.

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One of my favorite get-to-know-you questions is, “What’s the first concert you went to?” Whether a cool act or a cringy one, talking about that experience always stirs people’s emotions—and I get a better understanding of the person telling the story. At that moment, I see a glimpse of their younger self. 

My first concert was Depeche Mode, the masters of 1980s industrial-tinged synth pop. I remember buzzing with anticipation alongside my sister Rachel, then howling with thousands of our fellow teenagers when the lights dropped. As the band walked on stage, a distinctive series of notes echoed through the suburban arena, and the song “Black Celebration” began. We were all dressed in black, ready to celebrate. It was perfect. 

A few decades later, Rachel and I took our daughters to their first concert: the boy-band phenomenon One Direction. The girls liked their music but were hardly superfans; my sister and I were the ones who really wanted to go. (An attempt to recapture our lost youth, perhaps.) The band seemed aware of this intergenerational dynamic; at one point, Harry Styles took the mic and thanked all “the mums and grandmums who drove tonight.” It was both mortifying and hilarious. I hope my daughter enjoys telling that story one day. 

Thanks to pent-up, post-COVID demand, it’s been a great year for concerts. Ed Sheeran set attendance records during his recent United States tour, and Taylor Swift and Beyoncé did their share of filling stadiums, with Swift’s The Eras Tour already the highest-grossing concert film of all time. There’s something about losing yourself in a communal experience that’s immensely appealing in this age of virtual meetings and not-so-social media. We want to see the artists we love in person. We want to believe they’re singing directly to us. 

With streaming services paying minuscule amounts per song played, most musicians can no longer support themselves through recordings alone, so touring has become a financial necessity. While icons such as Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan can still draw a crowd by simply singing on a stage, other musical acts lure audiences with special effects, multiple costume changes, and eye-popping sets. The singer Pink even does high-flying aerial stunts during her shows. 

This reading list takes you on a mini-tour of different concert experiences, from moments of emotional connection to high-tech extravaganzas that are creating an entirely new kind of show. 

I Paid to See Beyonce in Three Different Cities on the Renaissance Tour. Here’s Why (Malaika Jabali, Essence, September 2023)

For Essence editor Malaika Jabali, Beyoncé’s album Renaissance was a lifeline, “a jolt of infectious energy pumped into our veins after two years of angst and despair.” She considered herself lucky to get tickets to see her musical idol in Toronto, but seeing the show only made her want to go again—and again. She even caught a last-minute flight from Atlanta to Tampa when she was able to get resale tickets hours before the Florida show. 

Jabali’s essay starts with a confession: “My name is Malaika, and I have a problem.” By framing Beyoncé’s concerts as a form of addiction, she explains how fandom can turn into near-obsession. Why else would anyone pay so much for last-minute tickets, let alone a madcap rush to the airport? 

Before reading this piece, I’d forgotten how much it means to see one of your musical idols in person. The Renaissance tour, Jabali writes, was a tribute to Beyoncé’s most die-hard followers, celebrating influences and references that resonated on a personal level. 

U2 Takes to Playing in the Round (the Very, Very Round) at Las Vegas’ Sphere With Spectacular Results: Concert Review (Chris Willman, Variety, September 2023) 

How does one of the world’s longest-running rock bands keep themselves relevant? By performing a one-of-a-kind show in a one-of-a-kind venue. U2 was the debut act of the recently opened Sphere in Las Vegas, and music critic Chris Willman says it was an apt pairing, “the apotheosis of a bigger-is-better ethos that has regularly occurred throughout the band’s career, and which they are not about to give up now that they’re in their 60s for any back-to-basics false modesty.” 

As a U2 listener from way back, I was curious about their latest reinvention; if money were no object, I’d have been dancing in the Sphere alongside Willman on opening night. Reading this account was the next best thing. Willman’s descriptions of the visuals that accompany each song are particularly vivid, but the show’s real brilliance, he writes, comes from the band’s ability to connect to its audience, despite the cavernous space.

The group that has spent so much of its recording output urging you to think about God, and other only slightly less weighty matters, is in Sin City mostly to make you say: “Oh my God.” And we can vouch that we were hearing that utterance, from people above, below and around us, in a kind of reactive, quadraphonic effect that nearly matched Sphere’s vaunted 22nd-century sound system.

This being U2, they would like to be seen as an overgrown club band at their core, at the same time they are producing the rock blockbuster to end all blockbusters. Wanting to have it both ways has worked for the group before, and it works again, in this setting. . . .  It’s a cliche to say that U2 can achieve intimacy in the midst of the most ridiculous extravaganza, but nobody in rock history has done a better job of taking visual and aesthetic dynamics to extremes. 

How Park Jimin of BTS Helped Me Feel Seen in My Brown, Queer Body (Padya Paramita, them, February 2021)

Like plenty of others in the COVID lockdown era, Padya Paramita dived into the music of K Pop superstars BTS as a form of escape. Even before the world shut down, she hadn’t been sure how to reconcile her conservative Bangladeshi upbringing with the gender non-conformity she’d experienced at her American college: “I struggled to share my pronouns and was confused about what they even were.” Being isolated at home only made that confusion catastrophically worse. 

Then she watched BTS play an online concert that was live-streamed to almost a million fans around the world—and a performance of the song “Filter” by singer/dancer Park Jimin brought her to tears. For me, this piece was a moving example of the power live music can have, even when you’re watching a concert performed halfway around the world.

The K-pop industry is heavily gendered. There have only been a handful of mixed gender bands among hundreds of boy and girl groups, and being openly queer is often completely out of the question for most K-pop stars — even heterosexual artists aren’t allowed to date publicly. Despite everything, Jimin started coming out of his shell, openly wearing outfits originally designed for women, shirts with the words “gender equality” and “radical feminist,” laughing at his bandmates for claiming selfies aren’t for men, and letting his dance moves flow freely.

Jimin reminded me of myself — I was born 75 days before him, 2500 miles away. Yet both of us had tried hard to please society and performed gender in a way we weren’t meant to put on. It both took us time to realize that society’s gender norms weren’t the law, there was no “male” or “female” when it came to fashion and behavior. We would still be loved, even if we took the risk of expressing ourselves in a real way.

The Story of the First Ever Glastonbury Festival (El Hunt, NME, June 2023)

Woodstock in 1969 was an era-defining event, paving the way for a new kind of concert: multiple bands playing outside over multiple days, to an audience of young people who were willing to put up with rain, mud, sunburn, and questionable portable toilets. Today, festivals such as Coachella and Lollapalooza are big businesses, with VIP tents sponsored by corporate brands. 

The Glastonbury Festival in England is one such success story, but as El Hunt writes in this appreciation, it started with “1500 hippies, five dogs, and one goat.” The festival’s co-creator, Michael Eavis, was a dairy farmer with “grand ambitions and a hefty overdraft,” who thought hosting an event on his land would be a good way to make money. (It didn’t quite work out that way.) 

Interviewing some of the original attendees, Hunt paints a picture of a more carefree time, when festivalgoers not only didn’t worry about pulling together Instagram-worthy outfits but often arrived with no luggage at all. Their memories take us back to a long-gone spirit of open-minded adventure when no one was quite sure what they’d find when they reached the festival grounds. 

Entry for punters cost £1, the equivalent of £5 in today’s money, and for that you got a carton of milk from the dairy farm. 

There was no super fence to keep out gatecrashers. In fact, when a group of hippies walked all the way to the farm from London thinking it was a free festival, the crowd chipped in for their entry fees. Advertising for the event was minimal, and info was spread by word-of-mouth. Attendance was far lower than the 3000 people expected, and Eavis didn’t break even, let alone earn enough to clear his overdraft. “It hasn’t been a disaster,” he told the BBC afterwards. “But it hasn’t been as good as I hoped.”

ABBA Voyage Concert Review (Paul Sinclair, Super Deluxe Edition, May 2022) 

Even at the height of their late-’70s/early-’80s fame, the Swedish pop phenomenon ABBA played relatively few live shows. As other nostalgia acts reunited in recent years, ABBA resisted the lure of a hefty comeback-tour paycheck; as music writer Paul Sinclair puts it, “45 years from their heyday, all four members are in their seventies and have concluded that no one wants, or needs, to see ‘old ABBA’ on stage, least of all them!” 

But was there a way to get “young ABBA” back? Sinclair describes the journey that led to ABBA Voyage, a London show starring the “ABBAtars,” 3D virtual images that perform alongside a live band. Why would anyone want to sit through an entire concert’s worth of holograms, I wondered? Then I read Sinclair’s review of the opening-night performance. Like me, Sinclair went in full of doubts, which were quickly swept away by a wave of ABBA-licious magic. 

ABBA Voyage is like some kind of wonderland. For 90 minutes you believe the unbelievable. I was concerned that I might have to work hard to enjoy the evening, but actually the suspension of disbelief is easy. Why? Because ABBA in their primes are standing right in front of you. Your brain might be trying to tell you it’s not real, but your heart, your databank of emotions – love, joy, regret, sadness – are tripping on overload. . . .

It seems inconceivable – and ultimately become irrelevant – that we are witnessing images on a 65-million-pixel flat screen. I’m still not sure I believe it. When the show starts, the lighting in the 3000-seat arena drops very low –but not so low that you can’t see the other people you are sitting amongst. This sense of a communal experience – laughing, singing, and crying and dancing to ABBA with other people – was very important to producer Svana Gisla, and I can understand why. Total darkness is too isolating. It’s these kinds of details that make all the difference. 

Survivors of Concert Violence Speak Out (Quinn Moreland, Pitchfork, March 2018)

Any time large numbers of people come together in a confined space, there’s a chance of things going wrong. When the Rolling Stones decided to play a show at the Altamont Speedway in California and hired the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang as security, it led to one of the first, most notorious concert disasters: a fan was stabbed to death while trying to rush the stage. 

Sadly, the death toll has risen significantly since then. For this piece, Moreland interviewed the survivors of four different tragedies: the Eagles of Death Metal concert at the Bataclan theater in Paris; the suicide bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England; the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida; and the shooting at the Route 91 country-music festival in Las Vegas. In their own words, these witnesses describe how the experience affected the way they process large, public events. Some always look for an exit route when they go to a new venue; others check how much security is evident. 

What’s striking is how many of those people still go to concerts. Before reading these accounts, I assumed that anyone who’d experienced such traumatic violence would stay away from crowded events entirely. A few have, of course, but I was touched and inspired by the stories of those who’ve refused to give up on live music. For Steve Munoz, a survivor of the Las Vegas shooting, going to concerts has even become a form of healing. 

Before that weekend, I’d never been to a music festival before, but I’m definitely more obsessed with going to concerts now. Listening to country music was a big part of it. I have all kinds of tastes when it comes to music, but ever since Route 91, I’ve only really listened to country. I felt like if I did not listen to music, I was giving that guy control because I would be associating all the evil that had happened with the music of that night. We all heal and deal with things differently, but for me, the music was what helped me get past the darkness of that night.

Elizabeth Blackwell is the author of While Beauty Slept, On a Cold Dark Sea, and Red Mistress. She lives outside Chicago with her family and stacks of books she is absolutely, positively going to read one day. 

Editor: Carolyn Wells
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

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In 2014, Longreads published its first Taylor Swift reading list, recognizing her (somewhat provocatively, perhaps, for the time) as a music business genius. But how could we have foreseen what the Taylorverse has since become? The past nine years have witnessed new albums, rerecorded “versions,” tours, spats, hookups (musical, romantic, otherwise), missteps, rebounds, the friendships with exes’ exes, and breaking the National Football League.

As the Eras Tour grosses a projected $2.2 billion in North America alone, and the October 27 rerelease of 1989 (Taylor’s Version) approaches, and her soon-to-be-released Eras Tour film is predicted to rock the film industry, Taylor Swift’s genius is no longer a question. She continues to get impossibly bigger, a supernova refusing to stop expanding, gobbling up ever more fans (and ever more money). Swift’s largesse over the last decade—on our devices, in our stadiums, on our screens, at our football games—has made the star even more of an unknowable cypher than ever: how can any of us relate to the champagne problems of a person whose condiment choices go viral? Yet even as Swift’s omnipresence makes her increasingly difficult to see, her brand is built on making us “feel seen,” in what Amanda Petrusich has identified as the star’s “chatty, ersatz intimacy.” She invites identification, but as her monocultural presence grows, this identification becomes ever more challenging, unless we project our own selves onto her. Swift’s artistic output is now entirely separable from Taylor Studies. 

This reading list collects pieces from the last decade that use Taylor Swift as a muse, a conduit, a springboard, or a punching bag in service of the authors’ own journeys. They demonstrate how, as Taylor’s Swiftdom grows, so too do the opportunities to use her as a lens through which we can project any number of issues—gender, race, identity, authenticity—and witness the prismatic results, a “kaleidoscope of loud heartbeats under coats,” an easter egg waiting to be unwrapped. She’s a mirrorball, after all, reflecting every version of ourselves.

Listening to Taylor Swift in Prison (Joe Garcia, The New Yorker, September 2023) 

Incarcerated for two decades and currently awaiting his first chance at parole, Joe Garcia reflects on how Taylor Swift’s music has accompanied him through the California prison system. As her lyrics provide solace and her voice offers happiness in a hopeless place, Garcia contemplates life beyond prison and what it means to love in broad daylight.

After several months, my belongings, including my CD player, finally caught up with me. I was getting ready to buy “Red” from a catalog of approved CDs when I learned that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, or C.D.C.R., had placed me on another transfer list. I didn’t want the album to get stuck at the prison after I had been transferred, so I resorted to a country station that regularly featured Swift. Sometimes, hearing Southern drawls and honky-tonk medleys, I’d laugh out loud at myself. But that was the station that played the widest variety of her music, from “Tim McGraw” to “I Knew You Were Trouble.” There was, in her voice, something intuitively pleasant and genuine and good, something that implies happiness or at least the possibility of happiness. When I listened to her music, I felt that I was still part of the world I had left behind.

Lack of Charisma Can Be Comforting (Anna Dorn, Los Angeles Review of Books, August 2023) 

For novelist Anna Dorn, Taylor Swift is what you might call a Bitch Eating Crackers. In this essay, Dorn comes to terms with her vitriol for an artist who suffers (in her opinion) from a fatal lack of charisma, and how she’s slowly been won over to the merits, if not the charms, of Swift. Much of that transformation comes down to Dorn recognizing how the things she finds annoying about Swift are also aspects of her own personality: the desire to people-please, the feeling that ultimately she’s not that talented. But ultimately, Dorn recognizes that Swift makes people happy, and that’s not nothing. 

I understand how looking at Taylor Swift shows me what I dislike and/or fear about myself. I fear we have the same type of unexceptional, bordering-on-unappealing WASP faces and share a history of throwing ourselves at people with little to no interest in us. We both identify as artists but lack something original to say, instead parroting a variety of inspirational source texts and current pop-cultural trends. Neither of us is supremely talented. Growing up, no one ever told me I was a good writer in a way I doubt anyone outside of Taylor’s family told her she had a good singing voice. Her voice is fine; my writing is fine. Our lack of charisma might be killing us.

Revenge of the Nerds (Taffy Brodesser-Akner, The Paris Review, June 2015) 

Once in a class I was teaching, a student highlighted a writer’s choice to use the “passive aggressive voice.” I’ve cherished the slip ever since. Before journalist and fiction writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner penned the definitive celebrity profile on noted Swift ex Tom Hiddleston, she wrote this ode to Taylor Swift’s use of the passive aggressive voice. In her current era, Swift may be rewriting her lyrics to better embody the brand of feminism she now espouses, but Brodesser-Akner’s piece reminds us that Swift’s subtle savageness has always been part of her appeal. 

Taylor’s career is, in fact, the perfected realization of every writer’s narrowest dream: To get back at those who had wronged us, sharply and loudly, and then to be able to cry innocent that our intentions were anything other than poetic and pure. Most of us can only achieve this with small asides. Taylor not only publicly dates and publicly breaks up, but she then releases an achingly specific song about the relationship—and that song has an unforgettable hook—all the while swearing she won’t talk about relationships that are over. Yes, date Taylor Swift, and not only will she shit on you on her album, but the song will become a single, then a hit, and then you will hear yourself shat upon by an army of young women at Staples Center. And then she’ll deny that she was ever doing anything other than righteously manifesting her art. It’s diabolical, and for a lifelong passive-aggressive like me, it’s made her my hero.

On Loving Taylor Swift While Being Brown (Vrinda Jagota, Pitchfork, November 2017) 

This thoughtful piece by Vrinda Jagota, written the year after Donald Trump was elected U.S. president and the year before Taylor Swift first endorsed Democratic candidates in her adopted home of Tennessee, explores how Swift has benefitted from and weaponized whiteness. While the pop star has come a long way since her post-Trump tentative steps toward political outness, Jagota’s readings of Swift’s public feuds with Black artists and blue-eyed-loving lyrics remain instructive, particularly when her paramours are racist assclowns. 

Each of these missteps has left me dubious not only of Swift’s brand of white feminism, but of the relatable vulnerability for which she is known. It’s alienating, not relatable, that even when faced with what appears to be an absurd accusation of neo-Nazi ties, Swift has shown an unwillingness to condemn the racists who adore her. It reminds me of how different our lived experiences are. Like all people of color, I don’t have Swift’s privilege of remaining quiet and thus neutral about white supremacy, particularly at this tense moment in time. Swift’s seeming indifference to the struggles of people of color has also led me to revisit her music—to wrestle with how it affected my teenaged understanding of femininity, and how her music may continue to influence young fans of color.

The Unbearable Whiteness of Taylor Swift’s Fandom (Jenna Mahale, Mic, December 2021) 

Bops and brilliant albums aside, Taylor Swift has galvanized 21st-century fan culture, and that has been one of the most remarkable features of her hyperbolically remarkable career. But what happens if you don’t see yourself represented within that culture? This piece, which picks up where Jagota’s essay leaves off, outlines a history of white conservatism within Swift’s fan community. Mahale notes how Swift’s insistence on emotional intimacy in her songs and her interactions with fans heightens fans’ own parasocial feelings toward the singer—and their willingness to “defend” her at any cost. 

Zoya Raza-Sheikh, a 24-year-old British Pakistani fan of Swift, finds that the extreme online behavior she’s witnessed as a Swiftie has alienated her from the fandom, particularly as someone who identifies as pansexual. For her part, Swift has been a vocal supporter of LGBTQ causes since her political “coming out.” “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” she told Vogue in 2019. “I didn’t realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of.” Unfortunately, this message hasn’t reached some of her most fervent fans.

Pleasure-y Guilt (Jay Jolles, Avidly, May 2021) 

In this brief and arresting piece, Jay Jolles charts his affection for Taylor Swift in relation to broad questions about gender, queerness, and feeling. For Jolles, it’s Swift’s unerring commitment to raw emotion that results in guilt when it comes into contact with white masculinity. As a trans man, Jolles teases apart the ironies and complications of being a male Swiftie. 

I have learned — having always been a Swiftie, but still very much in the process of apprehending masculinity — that many men worry about whether or liking Taylor Swift transcends a guilty pleasure and is instead indicative of some greater underlying thing — not a guilty pleasure but just a guilt. A quick perusal of the r/TaylorSwift community boasts many threads on the subject: am I [gay? weird? creepy?] for being a 34 year old straight white male who loves Taylor Swift? Will my girlfriend think it’s odd that I like Taylor Swift? Is it okay for me (38/M) to take my daughter to a Taylor Swift concert?

What this line of thinking evinces for me is not only that my fellow male Swifties are worried about what a potential like (or even love) of Taylor Swift’s music might mean, but that there is an element of guilt deeply imbricated within our understandings of taste and how they relate to a perceived type of manhood. The irony here is that I would argue that Swift herself is often crossing, if not blurring, the gender binary in her writing; not only when she is changing the pronouns in her songs. I think that this is in large part why her work is as legible to me as a twenty-eight year old man as it was to me as a fifteen year old girl.

Jill Spivey Caddell is a writer and teacher of U.S. literature, arts, and culture. She lives in the mountains of Virginia.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

“Seeing strangers connect in a positive way—that’s always a good sign of the value of a given cultural phenomenon,” he says. “Anything that can move 55,000 people for good or ill is worthy of our attention.”

One fan Donovan interviewed through his TikTok outreach, a 30-something Swiftie with a high-pressure job, suddenly found herself stuck at home during the height of the pandemic. She noticed that another resident in her apartment building had a Taylor Swift doormat. She left the neighbor a note, and the women began texting, then talking—with masks, at a distance, in the hallway—before eventually getting together for an overnight listening party to celebrate the midnight release of one of Swift’s 2020 recordings. Three years later they’re attending together an event that seemed inconceivable during those dark days—an Eras Tour concert uniting thousands of thrilled fans—asking, for a few brief hours, nothing more than what we have always asked of our idols: joy and deliverance.

Is it possible to make the internet a kinder place? Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom thinks so. In Wired, Nick Thompson reports on how Instagram has been working to clean up its photo sharing platform, creating tools for users to close comments on certain posts and ban offensive words—or, in one notable case, offensive emojis:

In mid July 2016, just after VidCon, Systrom was faced with just such an ophiological scourge. Somehow, in the course of one week, Taylor Swift had lost internet fights with Calvin Harris, Katy Perry, and Kim Kardashian. Swift was accused of treacherous perfidy, and her feed quickly began to look like the Reptile Discovery Center at the National Zoo. Her posts were followed almost entirely by snake emoji: snakes piled on snakes, snakes arranged numerically, snakes alternating with pigs. And then, suddenly, the snakes started to vanish. Soon Swift’s feed was back to the way she preferred it: filled with images of her and her beautiful friends in beautiful swimsuits, with commenters telling her how beautiful they all looked.

But Instagram can’t build that world with simple technical fixes like automated snake emoji deletion.

This was no accident. Over the previous weeks, Systrom and his team at Instagram had quietly built a filter that would automatically delete specific words and emoji from users’ feeds. Swift’s snakes became the first live test case. In September, Systrom announced the feature to the world. Users could click a button to “hide inappropriate comments,” which would block a list of words the company had selected, including racial slurs and words like whore. They could also add custom keywords or even custom emoji, like, say, snakes.

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If you don’t take Swift seriously, you don’t take contemporary music seriously. With the (arguable) exceptions of Kanye West and Beyoncé Knowles, she is the most significant pop artist of the modern age. The scale of her commercial supremacy defies parallel—she’s sold 1 million albums in a week three times, during an era when most major artists are thrilled to move 500,000 albums in a year. If a record as comparatively dominant as 1989 had actually existed in the year 1989, it would have surpassed the sales of Thriller. There is no demographic she does not tap into, which is obviously rare. But what’s even more atypical is how that ubiquity is critically received. Swift gets excellent reviews, particularly from the most significant arbiters of taste. (A 2011 New Yorker piece conceded that Swift’s reviews are “almost uniformly positive.”) She has never gratuitously sexualized her image and seems pathologically averse to controversy. There’s simply no antecedent for this kind of career: a cross-genre, youth-oriented, critically acclaimed colossus based entirely on the intuitive songwriting merits of a single female artist. It’s as if mid-period Garth Brooks was also early Liz Phair, minus the hat and the swearing. As a phenomenon, it’s absolutely new.

-In GQ, Chuck Klosterman interviews Taylor Swift on self-awareness while deducing whether or not she’s as shrewd and “calculating” (a word she hates) as her reputation suggests.

Taylor Swift on people who call her “calculating” http://t.co/Ecv8Q2FhLh pic.twitter.com/C1GQ54dVxj

— Catherine Rampell (@crampell) October 16, 2015

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Taylor Swift has done it again, this time getting Apple to change its streaming deal with artists. Here’s a collection of stories on how the pop star runs the music industry. 

* * *

1. The Future of Music Is a Love Story (Taylor Swift, Wall Street Journal)

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Swift says the future of music will be saved by this—the ability of a star to make millions of real friendships:

There are always going to be those artists who break through on an emotional level and end up in people’s lives forever. The way I see it, fans view music the way they view their relationships. Some music is just for fun, a passing fling (the ones they dance to at clubs and parties for a month while the song is a huge radio hit, that they will soon forget they ever danced to). Some songs and albums represent seasons of our lives, like relationships that we hold dear in our memories but had their time and place in the past.

However, some artists will be like finding “the one.” We will cherish every album they put out until they retire and we will play their music for our children and grandchildren. As an artist, this is the dream bond we hope to establish with our fans. I think the future still holds the possibility for this kind of bond, the one my father has with the Beach Boys and the one my mother has with Carly Simon.

2. The Secret Genius of Taylor Swift (Zoe Chace, Planet Money, 2012)

It’s not just the emotional bonds that will matter—it’s also the ability to thrive in a fragmented world where streaming overtakes individual album sales. Planet Money reported in 2012 that Swift and her team still know the best ways to move albums:

As Paul Resnikoff, editor and founder of Digital Music News points out, she has chosen from the toolbox only the outlets that would give her the most money for every album sold: Outlets that pushed a full album purchase.

The first week her album came out, you could only get it in a few key places: iTunes, Walgreens, Wal-Mart, Target. You could order a Papa Johns pizza and receive the CD — at the sticker price of around 14 bucks.

But the tools Swift didn’t use are as important than the ones she did. By refusing to release her singles on Spotify, or any other streaming site, she pushed her fans to buy the album. Spotify pays the artist pennies on the dollar. Taylor Swift skipped it.

3. You Belong With Me (Lizzie Widdicombe, The New Yorker, 2011)

As the New Yorker’s Lizzie Widdicombe noted in 2011, there were early signs that Swift had a keen business sense:

Early on, Swift assumed that she would follow her parents into business. “I didn’t know what a stockbroker was when I was eight, but I would just tell everybody that’s what I was going to be,” she recalled, during an online Q. & A. with fans. “We’d be at, like, the first day of school and they’re, like, ‘So what do you guys want to be when you grow up?’ And everybody’s, like, ‘I want to be an astronaut!’ Or, like, ‘I want to be a ballerina!’ And I’m, like, ‘I’m gonna be a financial adviser!’ ” But she eventually had a country-music epiphany, inspired by listening to nineties crossover hits—Faith Hill, Shania Twain, the Dixie Chicks. The melodies were good, but she especially liked the storytelling. “It was just such a given—I want to do that!” she said.

4. Taylor Swift Is the Music Industry (Devin Leonard, Bloomberg Businessweek)

After selling 1.29 million copies of her new album 1989, then pulling her music from the streaming service Spotify, Devin Leonard goes to Nashville to meet Scott Borchetta, founder of Swift’s label Big Machine Records, to understand the economics of being a label in 2014:

For that reason, Borchetta and Swift chose to initially withhold 1989 from Spotify. They did the same thing with Red in its early weeks. “We’re not against anybody, but we’re not responsible for new business models,” Borchetta says. “If they work, fantastic, but it can’t be at the detriment of our own business. That’s what Spotify is.”

Photo: evarinaldiphotography, Flickr