How to get rich (Taylor’s version)

Think you know the story of how Taylor Swift took on the music industry? The reality is more complicated

July 24, 2024, 1843 Magazine from The Economist

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Is there anyone on Earth who hasn’t heard of Taylor Swift? To the delight of millions and the chagrin of more it has become difficult to avoid her. Between March 17th 2023, when her money-printing Eras tour began, and February 11th 2024, when news sites live-blogged her flight across the Pacific to watch her beau play in the Superbowl, the New York Times published more than 1,000 pieces that mentioned the singer, only slightly fewer than those that mentioned Joe Biden, the president of the United States.

When I pick up my phone, social-media algorithms bombard me with clips of Swift performing in a sparkly gold leotard. When I put it down, I overhear conversations about her. On a train from Washington, DC, to New York earlier this year, a cluster of young women were debating whether the government had rigged the biggest American football game of the year so that “Taylor’s boyfriend” would win.

Like many others, I’ve found myself marking time with the milestones of her career. Her album “Folklore”, which she released in July 2020 to universal acclaim, offered a welcome respite from lockdown boredom. In November 2021, the day after I got engaged, she released a re-recording of “Red”, one of her early albums. My fiancé and I listened to it as we made hummus and baked a cake for a party we were hosting that evening.

And yet a mere five years ago I was largely immune to her charms. I liked her biggest hits, but I had never listened to an album from start to finish. (I’m not alone in my newish enthusiasm: at the end of 2019 there were around 80,000 members of the Taylor Swift subreddit. Now there are 2.8m.) The brilliance of “Folklore” played a part, but it was when Swift began to re-record her old albums that I really got hooked.

Fans will be familiar with the reason the singer remade her old works. In 2005 the preternaturally gifted teenager from Pennsylvania was signed by Big Machine Records, a Nashville-based label owned by Scott Borchetta. Swift recorded six albums with them. Under the terms of her contract, Big Machine kept the rights to the “masters” (the original recordings) of her albums. As Swift grew more successful, she became frustrated that she didn’t own these. Although she got modest royalties from her songs, she wasn’t earning as much as she would have if she had owned the masters outright. And she didn’t have full control over how her songs were used.

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