A thought experiment: Why is Taylor Swift as big as she is?

With three of six Taylor Swift shows in Toronto complete, the city — which really should be named “Tayronto” because it has given over everything to her — gets a chance to catch its breath and enjoy slightly less traffic and congestion until everything ramps up again for the next round of stadium shows on Thursday.

Southern Ontario — nay, Canada — hasn’t seen this kind of frenzy over a pop star in…well, maybe ever.

You’ve no doubt heard about the unbelievable amounts people have been willing to pay for tickets on the secondary market. One man emailed me marvelling that his daughter was planning to buy a ticket behind the stage for $5,000. I heard of a woman who was offered $38,000 for her tickets but refused to give them up. BlogTO has been monitoring the situation and found a seat going for $99,507 on Vividseats. (Prices have moderated substantially since then. I just did a search and found a floor seat near the catwalk for just under $12K. A bargain, right?) The absolute lowest last-minute ticket was listed for over $2,400. Those are Super Bowl-level prices. Maybe higher.

Meanwhile, basic hotel rooms are going for $2,000 a night or more. The city has extra transit. Taxi companies, Uber, and Lyft pulled out all the stops. A security zone was created around the Rogers Centre while the venue itself invested $8 million on upgrading its 5G infrastructure so that everyone in attendance can TikTok and Instagram their way to heaven. Unhoused people were moved away from the area and into hotels for the duration.

Some enterprising citizens have left town, renting their homes on Airbnb to fans. A city street has been named Taylor Swift Way. Taylgate parties — special events for Tay-Tay fans — have been packed.  There were long lines of people at Rogers Centre last week to buy merch — which all sold out, by the way.

The net economic gain to the city? Somewhere close to $300 million.

Lovely. A lot of fans are very, very happy and plenty of companies and people are going to reap some very, very big revenues. But… why?

Hang on, Swifties. This is not takedown of your idol. What follows is not meant to diminish, disparage, or otherwise discount anything about the object of your worship, devotion, and affection. And far be it from me to question your musical taste and how you spend your discretionary income. I’m just asking a simple question: Why is Taylor Swift as big as she is?

If you’re a Swiftie, the answer is so self-evident as to be ridiculous. She writes great pop songs. She puts on fantastic concerts. She’s attractive and stylish. She gives back to her fans. She’s known for wonderful acts of charity and philanthropy. She treats her employees and crew extremely well and routinely hands out big bonuses.

And there’s more. She offers just the right amount of female empowerment both in her songs and (perhaps especially) with her reputation as a hard-nosed businessperson in charge of her own destiny in an industry dominated by men. Her songs can be perceived as deeply personal (note the number of times she uses the word “you” in her lyrics. Other pro songwriters will tell you that’s a very, very powerful way of subtly connecting with a listener.) A strong, tightly-knit community of fans has grown around her, and that is a story unto itself. It’s a very large and loving sisterhood (although she, of course, does have plenty of male fans).

While she’s always in the tabloids, there’s almost never, ever anything negative written about her. All photographs are flattering. She’s got a Super Bowl-winning boyfriend and as a couple, the media treats them kindly, too. Meanwhile, one of the biggest entertainers in the world has managed to cloak herself in mystery. Everything she does from her social media posts to the clothes she wears onstage is parsed for secret meaning.

In other words, if you were to grow the perfect pop star in a test tube, the result would be Taylor Swift. But even in light of all this, I’m not sure if we’ve answered the question of her immense bigness.

Let’s start with the nuts and bolts of Taylor Swift Inc. As well as a celebrity and entertainer, she’s also a corporation with a very large back office filled with managers, accountants, lawyers, social media experts, concert specialists, designers, marketers, merch folks and general administrative workers responsible for running a multi-billion-dollar entertainment enterprise. Her people are obviously very good at what they do.

One of the most formidable employees is Tree Paine, her chief publicist. She, through her company Premium PR, been working for Taylor since 2014 and nothing happens to or with Taylor without her approval. You do not mess with this woman. She’s well-known and much-beloved by Swifties who often refer to her as “girlboss.” Who took on Kanye West for using Taylor Swift’s name in a song without permission? Who went after Kim Kardashian in conjunction with that? Who advises her on any political statements Swift makes? Who tamps down all the stories about old boyfriends? Tree Paine.

But there’s still more. Taylor’s ascent to her current heights began roughly with the ascent of the chaos created by Donald Trump. Her fame rocketed during his first term, through COVID, and through all the social division and strife that followed his defeat in 2020. Her music, image, and overall story is pure escapism, a distraction from all the terrible and weird things happening in the world. And her brand of escapism (see above) has been more effective than that offered by any other pop star.

Let’s pursue that line of thinking for a moment. There’s nothing controversial about any of Taylor Swift’s songs. They’re all crafted to cruise right down the middle of the pop music zeitgeist. Can you name a song where she’s taken a chance — I mean a real chance — at courting something even slightly off-brand for her? No. She is, let’s be honest, very middlebrow. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It works for her and it works for her fans.

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Which brings me to this: Maybe Taylor is as big as she is because of a lack of competition. Sure, there’s Beyoncé and her army in the Beyhive, but her Renaissance World Tour of 2023 grossed US$579,879,268, which is a very nice payday, good for number nine on the all-time top-grossing concert tours list. But the Eras tour is at US$1,930,000,000 — and counting.

What about Coldplay? Definitely a fan-friendly, eco-friendly, radio-friendly superstar global act that encourages fan engagement and community. But when Coldplay comes back to Toronto for a couple of shows at the still-to-be-built Rogers Stadium next July, do you think we’ll see the same amount of attention paid to them? Nope.

Who else competes for attention when it comes to contemporary mainstream pop stars? Ed Sheeran, definitely. Harry Styles is on the list. Pink? Maybe. And that’s about it. Taylor’s lane might be as wide as it is because there are so few cars on the road. She has so much of the pop culture landscape to herself. It’s one big, mostly vacant field.

None of this is her doing or her fault. The recorded music industry has done a terrible job of creating new superstars since the internet destroyed the old business of selling pieces of plastic to music fans. Streaming has cleaved music consumers into millions of micro-communities, each with their own object(s) of devotion. Back in the olden days of the 1990s, we’d see maybe 2,500 albums released over the course of a year. Today, Spotify received over 103,000 uploads of new songs every twenty-four hours.

In the pre-internet era, there was consensus, the idea that we were all listening to more or less the same things. Music was controlled by labels, radio, video channels, music magazines and record stores and doled out sparingly, allowing the acts to slowly rise to the top. That’s no longer the case. We’re all doing our own thing.

And then comes Taylor with her perfectly constructed, exquisitely produced, non-controversial escapist pop music, backed by a corporate management team who rarely makes a misstep when it comes to her career. The opening was there and they went for it.

One final question: Will Taylor Swift’s popularity endure?

I often think of Paul Whiteman, a big band leader from the 1920s and 30s who was extraordinarily popular, selling millions of records and playing before thousands of fans.

Papers referred to him as the “King of Jazz,” even though his brand of jazz was very white bread and, in the eyes of purists, jazz in name only. Whiteman was one of the biggest stars in American music — and then he wasn’t. His brand of music went out of style and critics — those whose opinions shape history and how people will be remembered — were vicious. When names of the big band era are brought up, Whiteman is rarely one of them. He was, as Antonio Salieri would say in Amadeus, a “mediocrity.”

I’m not for a second suggesting that Taylor Swift will suffer the same ignominious historical fate as Paul Whiteman. But I do wonder if in 50 years people will remember her songs the same way we do with The Beatles, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and even U2 today. Time will tell, I guess.

Meanwhile, Swifties, enjoy the ride. You and your idol are enjoying a level of domination and ubiquity we haven’t seen since the glory days of Michael Jackson and Thriller. Maybe even more given today’s reliance on social media and a hunger for connection in a time of extreme weirdness.

Part of the reason we got Beatlemania was because the world seemed to be going to hell in the wake of JFK’s assassination, the Cold War, and all the upheaval of the status quo caused by the Vietnam War, the rise in women’s rights and the civil rights movement. As the saying goes, before The Beatles, everything was in black and white. When they arrived, the world was suddenly in colour.

To follow that analogy, Taylor Swift is HD in 8K. Maybe Swiftomania is exactly what the world needs right now.

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