Time magazine named the
singer Taylor Swift as its person of the year for 2023. Such a force of nature
were her stadium-filled concerts during that summer that they triggered economic
booms in the respective host cities. In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for example,
hotel rooms went for as much as $2,500 downtown on the night of the concert. In terms
of American culture, the analogy of gravity waves may fit. During an interview
for television at her home (or one of her homes), Swift’s savvy business acumen
was very evident; her marketing prowess was extraordinary. She even re-released
her own songs, resulting in a huge financial windfall for what are really the
same songs merely re-sung. It is not as if she had grown a new voice. Swift
personifies American culture, whose “movers and shakers” seem “happy go lucky”
on stage yet, behind the scenes, they tend to be lazar-focused on the business
end. In short, considerable distance may exist between the societal image and
the private business practitioner, and the ethical element can get lost in the
shuffle and excitement.
To be sure, economics was evident
in the “Swiftie” phenomenon during the summer of 2023. According to Time,
Swift “achieved a kind of nuclear fusion: shooting art and commerce together to
release an energy of historic force.”[1] Her Eras concert tour "brought in a whopping $1.04 billion with 4.35 million tickets sold across 60 tour dates."[2] Not just any singer can make such a haul and even trigger municipal economic booms and saturate the media’s
attention worldwide simply by going on tour. Also, the magazine is clear that such
a gargantuan amount of money brought in is not “something we often chalk up to
the alignments of planets and fates,” for “giving too much credit to the stars
ignores [Swift’s] skill and her power.”[3]
In particular, her intense and sustained focus on every conceivable way, such
as by re-recording existing songs and bundling them (admittedly with some songs
from her vault) into albums in their own right, attending to merchandise and actively
using the media for free publicity, to increase revenue leveraged, or made use
of, her tremendous market power that was unrivaled; she dominated the airwaves
during the summer of 2023. The “Taylor’s Version” albums provide us with an
interesting case study wherein hype, money, and ethics are all in the mix.
According to Time, “Swift
began releasing re-recordings of her back catalog in 2021 in an effort to
reclaim her original music, after her initial label Big Machine Records sold
her masters to Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings in 2019. ‘Now Scooter has
stripped me of my life’s work, that I wasn’t given an opportunity to buy,’
Swift wrote. . . . ‘Essentially, my musical legacy is about to lie in the hands
of someone who tried to dismantle it.’”[4]
I don’t doubt the authenticity of her emotive motivation here. In the
vernacular, she was pissed. Even so, if
she had signed a contract with Big Machine Records giving it the unilateral
right to sell the masters of her songs, and the purchaser has the legal right of
use, then she had no legal or ethical claim to preempt the sale or be sold the
masters outright. Of course, if labels write heavily unfair contracts
essentially reflecting the commercial interests of the labels, taking advantage
of the lack of bargaining power of new signers, ethical critique is fair game.
By its very nature, a contract is
a coming together of (at least) two interests, with consideration
(money) given by one party to the other. A residential lease, for instance,
should reflect both interests. It should not restrict use of premises to be narrowed
down to reflect only how the property owner would use the space or would like
the space to be used. A property owner might prefer a “no guest” policy, but
such as “policy”—the very word being presumptuous—violates reasonable use of
premises. Furthermore, the property owner’s personal religious or moral
lifestyle, for instance, should not bind the counterparty as long as the
property itself is not damaged. “I don’t believe in eating meat, so you are
not allowed to use the kitchen of your apartment to cook meat,” for instance,
is presumptuous and dogmatic. More to the point, such a clause would violate or
nullify the fact that in receiving rent, the property owner is selling the use
of the space (as long as the property is not damaged). The mantra, “It’s my
house,” taken as an absolute, is circumscribed when use is being
sold for consideration (i.e., rent). Having it both ways is selfish and
childish.
Whether or not Taylor Swift
originally signed a one-sided contract is beyond my ability to investigate, given
the information that I have. Her fans did not know either, and so, because of her
emotional claim and her “star power,” her ethical cause resonated. Even so, it
can be asked whether it is ethical to have hyped “Taylor’s Version” albums to
the extent that buyers were willing to pay the full price of an album even if
they had most of the songs already. To be sure, the “Taylor’s Versions”
included “vault tracks”—songs not on the original albums. She also updated some
lyrics. Even so, it can be asked whether the additional work justifies a full
price of a new album. It can also be asked whether customers having receipts
for the original albums, such as Fearless, should have been able to buy Taylor’s
version at a discount. I submit that such a discount would be reasonable, given
both the amount of additional work on Taylor’s part and the substance of the
product (i.e., the extent to which it differs from the originals). A few songs
from the vault and some new lyrics do not render the albums commensurate with
albums filled with previously unreleased songs.
If Swift’s motivation was indeed
to gain control of her songs, she should have agreed to a discount. Fearless
(Taylor’s Version) had the biggest debut for any album in 2021,
with 722.7 million on-demand streams in the U.S. that year.[5]
Surely at least some of those customers already possessed the original album.
Of course, the irrational exuberance that would cause such a customer to buy
the same songs again can also be criticized, but many of her customers were
teenagers and thus easily taken in even by orchestrated hype of good feeling
seemingly aloft from the earthly taint of business strategizing. My point is
that it is no accident that Taylor Swift made a lot of money essentially
recycling songs ready for re-singing. She was not merely trying to regain
control over her work. I submit that she was acting as a business woman, and a
darn good one at that. Her true identity—her
driving financial ambition—was practically hidden under the blinding
glitter of the “nuclear fusion” that Time magazine describes. My point
is that the resulting sonic boom was orchestrated to coordinate and max out
both the hype and the revenue. Behind the moral cause, behind the curtains, Swift’s
financial acumen could be said to be a subterranean force of nature.
Such a force tends to be obscured, obfuscated, or, more often, intentionally hidden in the American entertainment industry. Similarly, elected representatives in Congress or the White House keep both their fowl tongues and their raw desire for power far away from the reach of microphones and cameras. In short, the sheer difference between private personas, including agendas, motivations, and even personalities, and the public images on the societal stage is astounding. Especially in politics in a representative democracy, this differential is a real problem that goes beyond the financial harm to young “Swifties” who have been subtly manipulated into buying (mostly recycled) songs at full price.
2. Maria Sherman, "Taylor Swift's Eras Tour Is the First Tour to Gross Over $1 Billion, Pollster Says," APNews.com, December 8, 2023.
4. Mariah Espada, “Taylor Swift Is Halfway Through Her Rerecording Project. It’s Paid Off Big Time,” Time, July 6, 2023.
5. Ibid.
