I’ve known this for a while, but it’s worth repeating: Taylor Swift is an excellent businesswoman. She’s smart, she knows her audience, she has a gift for marketing and PR and she thinks a lot about her music, her image and her fans. While I have issues with Taylor’s personal and romantic journey, even I have to give this to her: she’s one of the smartest pop stars we’ve ever seen. She’s right up there with Madonna when it comes to branding and capturing cultural zeitgeists. Swifty has a new interview with Yahoo and it’s ALL business. It’s all about how Taylor wants to get PAID for her music and she has no apologies about that. It’s about her business model and how she’s carving out success after success in an industry that doesn’t know where it’s going. You can read the full piece here and here are some highlights:
On her album having the highest first-week sales since 2002: “Well, my huge dream in this whole thing, which I was told many times was an unrealistic… I was told many times to keep my expectations in check, so I did. But the ultimate dream was, “Can we ring that bell? Can we get a million; can we do this for the third time?” Because we were all very well aware that if we sold a million records this time, it would be the only time in history that someone had done that three times. That was the most insane thing, when we got the first hint that we might end up actually getting to do it. And then my second biggest hope was, “Hey, wouldn’t it be insane if we topped what we did with Red?” And then the fans ended up making that happen, so it’s been just kind of like a dream scenario all the way around. And I just feel so lucky that people seem to understand what I was doing with this album and loved the new direction of it.
Why she didn’t offer the new album for free: “If I had streamed the new album, it’s impossible to try to speculate what would have happened. But all I can say is that music is changing so quickly, and the landscape of the music industry itself is changing so quickly, that everything new, like Spotify, all feels to me a bit like a grand experiment. And I’m not willing to contribute my life’s work to an experiment that I don’t feel fairly compensates the writers, producers, artists, and creators of this music. And I just don’t agree with perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free. I wrote an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal this summer that basically portrayed my views on this. I try to stay really open-minded about things, because I do think it’s important to be a part of progress. But I think it’s really still up for debate whether this is actual progress, or whether this is taking the word “music” out of the music industry. Also, a lot of people were suggesting to me that I try putting new music on Spotify with “Shake It Off,” and so I was open-minded about it. I thought, “I will try this; I’ll see how it feels.” It didn’t feel right to me. I felt like I was saying to my fans, “If you create music someday, if you create a painting someday, someone can just walk into a museum, take it off the wall, rip off a corner off it, and it’s theirs now and they don’t have to pay for it.” I didn’t like the perception that it was putting forth. And so I decided to change the way I was doing things.
Why she wants to sell albums, not just singles: “I guess it’s just a personal decision from artist to artist. But I’d really much rather write a novel than a bunch of short stories. I’d rather be known for a collection of songs that go together and live together and belong together. These are essentially installments of my life, two years at a time, and I work really hard to make sure that those installments are good enough to also apply to other people’s lives in two-year periods of time. Albums defined my childhood, and they’ve defined my life. I just hope that they will continue to define people in newer generations’ lives. I’m so proud of my fans for going out there, over a million strong, and proving that albums still matter to them and that art is still viable to them.
She also talks about how “the most profound relationship I’ve ever had” is with her fans and she feels she has to nurture that relationship and never take her fans for granted. It’s pretty smart. As for Taylor’s thoughts on why music should not be free… I get it. The guys from Metallica believed the same thing years ago and they lost a lot of fans because of it. I do think Swifty has found a model that works for her, but the thing is… it pretty much JUST works for her, because she’s so smart about how she markets, promotes and curates her fandom. Her successful path cannot be replicated with any other pop stars.
Photos of Swifty arriving in Japan this week, courtesy of WENN.
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