After months of waiting for new music from Taylor Swift, her latest album was leaked a day before the release date. The Tortured Poets Department immediately broke the record for the most illegally downloaded album ever. Even radio DJ Domien Verschuuren couldn’t resist the first announced single Fortnight turn on a day early Qmusic.
This cost him dearly: angry Taylor Swift fans soon gathered on the radio station’s social media channels. Some reported his behavior to Swift and her management, others tagged her label Universal Music Group, and a few appeared to threaten violence against Verschuuren. Playing the music a day early went against Swift’s wishes. And especially with Taylor Swift, her fans write, it is important to listen to the music as she intended.
It may sound like a plea for protecting an artist and the art she creates. Yet Swift is characterized as a musician by her business instinct. She knows better than anyone how the music industry works. For example, she regularly spoke out about the lack of streaming income for musicians and against the opportunists who resell her concert tickets for high prices.
One hundred million dollars a year
With the well-negotiated contract she signed with Universal Music Group in 2018, she not only obtained the copyright, but also the distribution rights to all the music she makes under the label. Copyright protects Swift as a writer and composer, while distribution rights give her the power to offer physical copies of her work commercially. Highly unusual. Once the deal with Swift was completed, the label’s lawyers amended all existing contracts with other artists so that they would not be able to imitate Swift. Swift herself consistently rakes in more than $100 million a year from Spotify streams alone.
Swift didn’t invent capitalism, but she is very good at it
For The Eras Tour, her international tour, huge amounts of money were also sold through official channels for tickets and merchandise. At the beginning of this month, Swift became a billionaire, partly thanks to that tour: something only Jay Z, Rihanna and Paul McCartney can imitate her in the music world.
The fact that Swift already has enormous amounts of money makes no difference to the fans who went to war against Verschuuren and Qmusic. In Taylor Swift’s fandom, supporting the artist financially occupies a crucial place: art and capitalism are inextricably linked. For these fans, every euro spent on Swift symbolizes their loyalty and devotion. The singer actively encourages fans to show their love by buying multiple versions of the same album, owning as much merchandise as possible, and tackling illegal streamers. For Taylor Swift, love doesn’t go through the stomach, but through the wallet.
Although the enthusiasm with which fans respond to it may be remarkable, this capitalization of the music industry is not limited to Swift. The fact that Swift charges high prices for her services and products is not exceptional: a singer like Beyoncé, for example, also does the same. You could also buy expensive tickets for her concert for special VIP seats, and you can also order multiple versions of her latest album in her webshop. What sets Swift apart from her fellow artists is her unbridled productivity: her tour is bigger and longer, there is more merchandise, there are more albums.
She embodies an almost inhuman limitlessness. This seems magical, until you consider the immense amounts of money she has at her disposal to invest in her creativity. A capitalized music industry works no differently than the neoliberal society surrounding it: here too, financial inequality only increases, and social mobility only decreases. With a lot of money you can take big risks and set up ambitious projects, while with little money you can barely get your foot in the door.
Where small-time artists and professional session musicians struggle to make ends meet, Swift can make whatever she wants, whenever she wants, how often she wants. And so each of Swift’s utterances is bigger, longer, and more intense than the one before it.
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The same goes for this album. To everyone’s surprise, not one, but two new Taylor Swift albums were released on April 19. The leaked part may have already been widely streamed, but this second album was brand new. With her knowledge of the music world, the singer might have expected the album to be leaked. So she gave her fans not 16, but 31 new songs. The album is too large to be printed on a single LP, so if you as a fan want to own a physical copy of the complete album, you will have to purchase a number of variants. The fans don’t care, they like to let their hearts be spoken through their bank cards. The fact that Verschuuren leaked the number is illegal and irrelevant at the same time. Because no matter how it plays out, Taylor Swift always wins. Just as she intended.
Swift didn’t invent capitalism, she’s just very good at it. If Swift disappeared from the face of the earth tomorrow, this system would not collapse. Neither Swift nor her fans are the instigators, but both are a gigantic, undeniable symptom of a world where success and culture are accessible to those who can pay the most for it.
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