Haters gonna hate, but Taylor Swift really is extraordinary – here’s why

Taylor Swift donated $100,000 to the family of a woman killed during the Kansas City Chiefs’ victory parade. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez, File)

So all-encompassing has been the media and public interest in Taylor Swift this week that it would be easy to imagine everyone is a fan. Clearly, though, that is not the case.

There are those who can’t stand her – haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate – and there are those who have barely even heard the name, or have heard it but don’t really know what it means, or why it matters.

But matter it does. Because regardless of what you think of her music, what Swift has accomplished is truly extraordinary – and how she has achieved it is equally so.

The Eras tour that has brought her to Australia has become the first concert tour in history to gross more than $US1 billion ($1.5 billion), and is predicted to wrap up with a haul close to $US2.2 billion from its North American dates alone. With an average ticket price of around $195 (including the limited-view seats released last week), and a capacity of 96,000, the three Melbourne shows will have grossed close to $19 million each.

The next closest in terms of revenue is Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road farewell tour, which by the end of 2023 had grossed $US939 million – but had taken five years and five times as many shows as Swift to get there.

She isn’t the biggest-selling artist in history, and not even the biggest-selling woman – Madonna still holds that record, with an estimated 400 million units (albums and singles, and digital equivalents) sold since 1982. But her 200 million units places her in sixth spot on the female artist chart, behind (in ascending order) Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Celine Dion and Rihanna – and significantly, only Rihanna is still meaningfully active as a recording and performing artist.

Swift (and Rihanna) enjoyed much of their success at a time when the recorded music industry appeared to be in terminal decline (a slump from which it has miraculously recovered, thanks to revenue from legal subscription-based streaming such as Spotify, where Swift has around 104 million monthly listeners, and was the most streamed artist of 2023, with more than 26 billion streams).

But Swift has also been credited with helping to drive the resurgence of vinyl and other legacy formats. When her re-recorded 1989 (Taylor’s Version) dropped last November, not only did its tracks occupy eight of the spots on Billboard’s top 10 singles chart (where streaming is the order of the day), but 93 per cent (1.261 million) of units sold were in physical formats – CD, vinyl LP and cassette. That was almost half of all physical recorded music sold in the US that week.

That album was the fourth to be re-recorded by Swift, her response to a contractual dispute that saw the masters to her first six albums sold by her former label boss to a private-equity firm. The Taylor’s Version strategy is audacious, and has been sold to the world as an instance of a female artist striking a blow at the male-dominated music industry, a narrative that – like so much in the world of Taylor Swift – is both utterly compelling and open to varying interpretations of motive.

The idea of Swift as a feminist warrior was certainly bolstered by the 2017 court case in which a Colorado radio DJ who had been fired for sexually harassing her four years earlier had sued for defamation (she counter-sued, won, and was awarded the $1 in damages she had symbolically sought). And the intense scrutiny on mainstream and social media – which has sometimes taken the form of slut-shaming – has added to the idea of her as a woman who refuses to bow to the patriarchy, while singing songs about bad-boy hunks who done her wrong.

If Swift presents as a complex and sometimes contradictory figure, that only seems to make her more adored by her fan base. And it’s big: a recent survey found that 53 per cent of Americans consider themselves Taylor Swift fans, and one in six think of themselves as “avid” fans.

There are those on the other side, too, of course. A different survey last week revealed that almost one in five Americans believe right-wing conspiracy theories that propose there is “a covert government effort” in which she has been enlisted to help Joe Biden (whom she supported in 2020) to win re-election. Unsurprisingly, 83 per cent of those people planned to vote for Donald Trump in November.

Like Trump, Swift largely speaks to her fan base directly – through social media (literally until 2017, when all her accounts were deleted and the record wiped clean, and turned over to her PR team, led by the fantastically named Tree Paine); music videos (often directed by herself); and any platform she can commandeer (such as last month’s Grammy awards ceremony, where she used her acceptance speech for best album of the year to promote her next one). She rarely speaks to the media, and when she does so it is in a carefully orchestrated format, like the interview given to Time magazine when it declared her its Person of the Year for 2023.

All of this has brought Swift immense wealth – around $US1 billion, according to some estimates – an enormous level of fame, and an uncommonly close relationship with her fans, who feel they have access to her most intimate thoughts and feelings, and she to theirs.

It has made her one of the most significant cultural figures of our time, perhaps of any time. And that is, quite simply, why Taylor Swift matters, whether you know her or don’t, and whether you like her music or not.