> Taylor Swift doesn’t understand supply and demand:
I think that's a poor reading of Swift & her team. They've clearly got a rock-solid understanding of supply & demand, and other economic concepts, to the extent that their behaviour subverts textbook economic thinking.
Spotify acts like a textbook perfectly competitive marketplace: all actors have perfect information, there are no monopolies, the market price for all items is the same, and all vendors are price-takers (the platform controls the price). Within this framework, Scooter Braun's masters of Swift's work, and Swift's "(Taylor's Version)" re-recordgins are homogeneous products. A textbook reading of this setting should assert that, through supply & demand, both versions should attract an even split of consumption. But most consumers willingly choose to listen to Taylor's re-recordings[1] over Braun's masters.
>> Taylor Swift doesn’t understand supply and demand:
> I think that's a poor reading of Swift & her team.
My read of Thompson's piece was that he agrees with you. He quoted Patel to say that he (Thompson) agreed with him (not her) back in 2014 but later learned that this reasoning was wrong -- too shallow and too net-boosterist.
If the products were homogenous they wouldn't have different names. Are you under the impression that the phrase "Taylor's Version" was chosen at random? Could the labeled active endorsement of the artist, with whom millions of fans have a parasocial emotional bond, possibly be affecting consumer choice in this matter?
Of course it can. Nobody's "subverting textbook economic thinking," a ridiculous assertion.
> Taylor Swift doesn’t understand supply and demand:
That statement is even more laughable when you realize that she is one of the most financially savvy people, and both her mother and father worked in the financial industry.
The Billboard article seems to be saying that when the new album was released people… bought the new album rather than the old one (they probably already had) during the same time period.
And that total streams on new tracks are higher than old tracks that weren’t on streaming for years and (as the OP notes) people had to buy copies.
Certainly hardcore Swifties are staying true but most consumers just don’t care about the morality of their music (see Chris Brown for instance).
> Contrary to what you might have heard, Spotify does not pay artist royalties according to a per-play or per-stream rate; the royalty payments that artists receive might vary according to differences in how their music is streamed or the agreements they have with labels or distributors.
> Taylor Swift doesn’t understand supply and demand
I interpreted this as a criticism of Swift's attempt to generalize her experience to the rest of the artists in the industry.
As you say, Swift and her marketing team have a solid understanding of what her fans will accept. However, to have her say that her tactics are applicable to musicians who don't have anywhere near her sort of following comes across as tone-deaf (heh) at best, and disingenuous at worst.
I think Bo Burnham had a bit this reminds me of on Taylor Swift:
"Taylor Swift telling you to follow your dreams is like a lottery winner telling you to sell everything and invest in the lotto." being the culmination
The connection with Disney in the title seemed weird but it makes sense. The nut of his thesis is that we don't actually want to live our whole lives online, though things that are easier there (say buying singles) won't return to the real world.
Two two revenue moat opportunities: 1 - physical experiences and 2 - customer "investment" drives enthusiasm, as a kind of brand-fueled sunk cost fallacy.
Successful b2c businesses understand point 2, but the cool thing is that it can be supercharged through point 1 (if you have such a business...doordash is out of luck on this one; WeWork pretended that they were trying it).
Disney is interesting - the business is a survivor. Iger was smart to come back and turn around the Chapek disaster, but I get the feeling he doesn't know where to go from there. But even under Chapek they didn't forget the importance of IRL:
I have an extended family relative who works in film distribution with Disney. Even during Covid when they furloughed or laid off lots of people and focused on streaming, they didn't lay him off, which seemed odd to me (it's not like he is a VP, and theatres were closed). A few times we talked about the film business and his belief was straightforward: streaming doesn't make meaningful money while a film in a cinema can do hundreds of millions of dollars. I was dubious (I hate the cinema and the whole "movie" experience) but Barbenheimer is a good example of why I'm probably wrong.
So then when you look at Walt Disney's drawing included in the article, you see a semicircle of "experiences": parks, films, and (underexploited by Disney) concerts, and semicircle of "reinforcement" so your brand remains front of mind: streaming, toys and other in-home products. That's where you can get the pushme-pullyou. So streaming can be a winner even if it's run at a loss.
Meanwhile what's dying is ESPN, ABC, and the general TV business, dragging Disney down.
Yes, the brands they own that don't have good multipliers seem like they're starting to slow them down. Stuff like Marvel and Star Wars integrate into their system extremely well.
ESPN is odd because it is a multiplier on its own, but doesn't really seem to generate any money outside of advertising. The sports teams and their own live events benefit from the ESPN system though. I don't know who would buy that brand, it made the most sense as its own cash cow.
Personally I've seen Disney weather many storms in the past, they have pushed out a lot of stinkers and have even had long periods of duds. But their back catalog and branding always remained strong. Disneyland will probably continue to make profitable returns and continue to be a destination. And honestly they may have just focused on the wrong things when it came to streaming, its possible it'll rally with a different focus, like something that strengthens their brand in the long run. I guess I don't really see Disney declining in the wrong run as long as they can make adjustments and play to their strengths again, while ditching the stuff that is weighing them down.
> Stuff like Marvel and Star Wars integrate into their system extremely well.
The market appears to have reached the fatigue point with those (and Indiana Jones). Either they mismanaged the brands or properly milked them heavily while the market was hot. I suspect the latter, perhaps intentionally. Even the Beatles faded with time.
ESPN's big money maker turned out to have been cable carriage fees (I assume the same was true for ABC, but don't know). That is augering.
I'm not a huge fan of Disney as a cultural influence but, as you note, they have survived pervious difficult periods and will probably profit from the new world that is developing.
I'd guess that "the market" would be perfectly happy with good movies in the Star Wars and Indiana Jones film franchises. What we've been getting is "deconstructions of the patriarchy" instead. That is, rather than continue the story of beloved characters, or have them become beloved mentors for a new generation, Disney has taken male characters, painted them as weak, stupid, or damaged, then inserted a female that is already completely awesome without any learning or earning. Said female berates the beloved character throughout the movie, then saves the day instead of the male character.
They did this in Indy 5, they did this in the new Star Wars movies, they did this in Marvel's Secret Invasion, and She Hulk... And it's awful.
I remember reading the following quote about music in the 1950s and 60s:
"Prior to this era, there was no distinction between music adults and teenagers listened to. E.g. Frank Sinatra was popular with multiple age demographics.
Starting in the late 1950s, being a cool teenager meant that you liked music that was different than what your parents listened to. This was first seen with rock and roll."
It's interesting to see this come full circle to the point that Taylor Swift crosses multiple age brackets.
I certainly saw the claimed fracturing of music along various demographic lines but I always wondered how true it was.
It certainly felt that way and it was talked about... but people I knew always listened to a variety of music. The running joke on Youtube about something like Wilson Philips "Hold on" was that "Somewhere out there there's <insert unlikely demographic> is rocking out to this song".
I don't doubt there were differences among demographics, but I also wonder how much we as humans look for those lines and exaggerate them. I honestly didn't even know who Taylor Swift was for an embarrassingly long time and I yet enjoyed her songs when I heard them. I wonder if for most of the masses it really doesn't matter, but enthusiasts and marketers are the folks who care / notice the differences that might not ever have been THAT stark.
> It certainly felt that way and it was talked about... but people I knew always listened to a variety of music.
Before about 2000 I think you'd find most people, not all but most, tended to listen to smaller varieties of music. Top40/Pop radio stations played a very safe middle ground of music. There was never anything too avant-garde or experimental. The 70s and 80s saw a lot of radio stations cropping up targeting particular genres rather than just one late night DJ that loved that genre. This included "oldies" stations catering to previous decades' Top40 back catalogs. Big record stores were very clearly organized by genre which was copied by the big box stores when they started carrying significant music sections.
It wasn't until finding single tracks online was easy that I think many people branched out with musical styles. Someone hearing a single on the radio of a genre they didn't normally listen to were unlikely to go drop $15 (in 199x dollars) on a whole CD of that artist. Relatively few artists actually released CD singles (in the US) so that $15 entry fee to a new genre wasn't trivial.
Fast forward to the early 00s in the era of P2P and iTunes (the clear industry juggernaut) and singles were now readily available. If you wanted that one rap or dance track you could easily get it without dropping $15 on a whole album. YouTube and then streaming just made this sort of thing even easier and cheaper. Someone spending $10 a month on music in 1993 had access to far fewer choices than someone spending the same amount today.
I think Taylor Swift is a unique case. Not unrepeatable, just currently unique.
For one she is genuinely talented. Many pretty singers are in fact terrible song writers and mediocre musicians. Their hits are often written by middle aged men, occasionally middle aged women, and rarely themselves and pulled from fake books.
Taylor Swift can write music, sing, dance, and even play her music so she is in rare company with those talents. It helps her a great deal she is attractive. There's plenty of talented women in music that aren't/haven't been as successful because they aren't "pretty".
The second part of her uniqueness is she came up in an age of peak media saturation and peak ease of distribution. When Taylor Swift started the Internet was already big and she had a significant online following. iTunes ascension was also happening so she could easily sell to people only wanting singles rather than whole CDs which maximized her sales under the price/demand curve. P2P file trading was also prominent so she got even more space under the price/demand curve.
The third part of her uniqueness is her age. She's positioned right between Millennials and Gen Z which are both pretty large demographic cohorts. Even her early work was fairly mature (considering her biological age) so it didn't just appeal to people her age. If she was ten years older I don't think she'd have her current level of impact, it would be significant but might not straddle generations so she'd have far fewer younger fans.
The situation in the 50s and 60s was very different. Distribution was harder and more expensive, there were fewer radio stations, and music on TV was very limited. Not to mention just fewer radios and TVs. A household might have one of each but it wouldn't be until the later 60s you might expect a teenager to have their own record player or radio in their bedroom.
By the time of Taylor Swift it would be uncommon for a middle class teenager to not have at least their own radio. A non-trivial segment had their own computers by then so could easily access Taylor Swift's online presence, fan-based or direct.
So I'm not sure her appeal to multiple age brackets being the overall industry coming full circle but instead some unique factors of Taylor Swift individually.
The average American kid in the 90s never had a chance to go either, but knowing that Disneyland is a real place changes your perspective or relationship with the content. It feels more real and more permanent. Knowing that millions of people are going and have gone to a real place where the characters "live" sets them apart.
That's my take anyway. It would be interesting to know the % of kids in the US that have been to a Disney park at various points in time. My wild guess is that the number has always been well under 10%.
The parks are a very particular thing, obviously oriented towards children. But recently some people have been talking about how they might offer "live experiences" that go beyond that.
Disney just shut down the Galactic Starcruiser, a two-day immersive Star Wars LARP experience which was weirdly mis-marketed as a hotel. Adrian Hon has a long, interesting writeup on it and suggests that future versions could be much more successful:
https://adrianhon.substack.com/p/star-wars-galactic-starcrui...
Comics were popular but even behind Iron Curtain we had all the Disney stuff, starting from the Snow White ending on Duck Tales, Rescue Rangers, Donald and Mickey shorts. It was as common as dirt for kids in Poland.
That's style dependent. Nobody's belting or doing fry/false chord distortion for 3 hours, but a gentle throaty style of singing could easily be sustained for longer with water breaks.
Small clarification: that's 6 shows over 7 nights. 3 nights, then off one night, then 3 more nights. So she does get a break, but in general I completely agree.
I saw Taylor Swift play years ago, it was an incredibly impressive show, choreographed down to the minute I'm guessing, even her crowd banter was seemingly predetermined. She's a professional through and through it seems, and I guess she's figured out how to make it work without destroying her vocal chords.
I wonder if it is partially lip syncing. Apparently when Celine Dion was performing nightly in Vegas she mixed lip syncing in to her performances to give her voice a break.
(I don’t have a source on that, just something I remember hearing years and years ago)
Enrique Iglesias was called out by Howard Stern for crappy vocals in his concert 23 years ago (good lord!).[0] Enrique explained that they overdubbed some of his songs so much in concert that you couldn't tell he was deliberately singing off key, that is until someone gave Howard Stern a copy of the mic feed.
I don’t think she’s substantially lip-syncing (maybe here and there, but not continuously). I was at the Detroit show and she confessed to having a bit of a cold during the interim into Evermore. And indeed, she coughed and sniffled a bit during other songs it was picked up by her mic. She also got a little short of breath during heavy dance numbers.
Maybe I’m easily fooled, but if she was lip-syncing a lot I don’t think they’d leave these imperfections.
> Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for.
the rarity is not the source of the value, but an amplifier for the value in a market driven society
> It’s my opinion that music should not be free, and my prediction is that individual artists and their labels will someday decide what an album’s price point is. I hope they don’t underestimate themselves or undervalue their art.
does she understand privilege? she's a music slaver, she's advocating that music remain a limited experience accessible for a few. I have a HUGE problem with this.
this is, in my view, an energetic interaction centered about value, perceived value, and measured value. i could say more but i rant... something something digital assets can be copied for free let's not let a scarcity mentality ruin this for all.
finally, what she really sells in her shows has real value, the scarcity is her physical existence, this is NOT THE SOURCE OF VALUE. the energy/money dynamics are a form of power.
edit: I echo this sentiment: "Sad to see generations grow up on music being a spectator sport and not a communal, participatory activity". but notice how this huge Taylor mega shows ARE a communal activity. Dancing is the main avenue for communal musical participation
> does she understand privilege? she's a music slaver, she's advocating that music remain a limited experience accessible for a few
She's advocating that artists get paid for their work and not sell themselves short. Whatever means our society permits that allows artists to capture the value of their work should be taken. If you want music to be "open access" and effectively patronage that's fine but it doesn't change her point.
We're in a golden era right now where the art itself is so cheap it might as well be free and paid for by scarce goods sold to fans who can afford them. If you squint it's almost pay-what-you-want. My $10/mo Spotify subscription cost me $0.00002/hr last year.
I thought this would be about how both are reissuing / remaking their old content instead of making something new. Consumers seem to be eating them both up though.
Though there is a big difference between a live artist performing old content (which is kind of the point, you want a live performance) and Disney making poor copies of masterpieces with newer technology.
Maybe he's just not old enough to remember trying to get Madonna or Michael Jackson tickets. Camping out at record stores for days to be first at the Ticketmaster booth. Or at the venue itself.
I wasn't old enough to go but I remember seeing the pictures on the news.
I'm a heavy Bill Simmons podcast listener as well as with other podcasts on the Ringer Network. I had only head music by Taylor Swift sporadically in the past.
Those podcast discussions about Swift in the last several years have heightened my awareness of her music. I'm not particularly a fan but I now stream each new release.
I think media publicity benefits both sides. And my experience of the world is slightly bigger as well.
I still could not accurately identify one of her songs by audio if my life depended on it OR if someone offered me $100 million I'd definitely lose out on that money.
Yet, she is the biggest popstar on the planet.
It's weird, somehow she is everywhere in image and presence but the art she produces eludes me.
On the other hand, there are catchy songs like the Benny Hill theme that I know by heart, yet I could not name the proper name of the song nor who composed it. I just know it as the Benny Hill theme.
If you heard her most popular songs you would probably recognize having heard them before, even if you don't know they are hers.
These each have multi-billion views on YouTube. I suspect if you listen you will recognize them. And if not, well here you go! Now you've heard Taylor.
I never said I haven't heard her music. What I meant was that I cannot properly identify her particular music.
Like I said, if I was in a game show scenario, maybe I could guess that a song is hers and win the money, but if you gave me a multiple choice and you put in songs with other artists who sound like her then there's a good chance I'd lose.
Her music isn't that hard to identify, even if you don't listen to it. It has a country-folk song structure, and a simple rhyme scheme. Listen to a few songs and you'll see what I mean.
Meanwhile, I'm coming from the other side - I'm a musician and I've been wondering why is it I don't care much for the music of the biggest pop star on the planet? Usually when it comes to the "pop tarts" as I call them, they have something I like.
Not so with Taylor Swift.
I've listened to all her top hits. I've tried using AI to find songs I might like based off of other music I like. I've basically come up empty-handed. If there's a song where the music is interesting, it's ruined with her vocals or her simplistic rhyme schemes (I really find her rhyme schemes super annoying!).
The most interesting song she has is Shake It Off. The use of a saxophone in modern pop music is welcome and I find the repetition in lyrics better than her usual rhyme schemes. No surprise it was co-written by Max Martin.
> I still could not accurately identify one of her songs by audio if my life depended on it OR if someone offered me $100 million I'd definitely lose out on that money.
Both this comment and the comment it's responding to are indicative of people living in their own bubbles. It's entirely reasonable that plenty of people just don't expose themselves to contexts where they would have had any opportunity to hear any given musical genre. This is easier than it's ever been since the invention of radio, thanks to the fracturing of culture via recommendation algorithms and the long tail that the internet facilitates.
An even easier way to not be familiar with her: living in a country where she's not that important: <https://chartmasters.org/taylor-swifts-global-heatmap/>. So it's pretty easy in: Chile, Switzerland, Italy, France, Argentina, Costa Rica, Spain, Netherlands, Southern America in general, Eastern Europe, Northern Europe... Lots of countries really. Living in a given country is not much of a bubble. Imagining that pop stars popular where you live are universally popular is very much a bubble.
If you don't listen to the radio, how could you hear them? I'm probably in the only demographic that doesn't have swifties, most people my age streams movies and uses adblockers so I honestly couldn't identify a song by her if I didn't write her name in Youtube just to see what the deal is.
Music is so fragmented these days that there's no comparison to Pink Floyd and Rolling Stones days.
I don't understand why you're being downvoted, I share the same sentiment. I don't know a single Taylor Swift song and I couldn't for my life know for sure a song from her, I'd probably be thinking of her or Katy Perry.
I think it's being downvoted for the "Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn't Own A Television" energy of it, basically a combination of being an irrelevant tangent to the actual topic and boasting about ignorance of pop culture.
The only person I know who couldn’t recognize a Taylor Swift song is my dad, who is a 70-year old Bangladeshi man who listens to American country and Bangladeshi village music on YouTube.
The solution is obvious, Disney should do more, take real risks and swing for the fences again. Because there's no reason not to.
And what they should do more of isn't legacy content in a new medium — i.e. putting those same TV and movies online instead of cable, but new content that hasn't been completely explored yet.
The above games don't seem to be games anymore — at least, not in the Kerbal Space Program sense, my only frame of reference. They're content distribution systems with players consuming content in bite-sized doses as they play. Their active user bases are larger than what Disney's, and arguably more engaged.
These titles are usually quite violent and based on new IP. With their coffers and IP library, Disney could easily make something better that offers more compelling experiences with modern technology.
Disney Research has been chugging along on doing "story telling" with the help of ML for quite some time now, https://studios.disneyresearch.com/projects/ , with recent advances, they could conceivably arrive at interactive storytelling experiences that allows every child (and adult) to be inside the fantasy universe of, say, Beauty & The Beast and play out a meaningful role in that universe.
If the current modes of content and content delivery don't work, why shouldn't they try something like this at a larger/more serious scale?
If anyone can turn games into a mainstream content delivery platform, it's Disney. And by owning the means of distribution, they can go back to adding more arrows to Walt Disney's diagram.
It seems as though the author has a (relatively) specific view of both Taylor Swift and Disney that he is trying to generalize, while ignoring the social ecosystem that both currently exist in.
I don't know what knowledge can really be gleaned from this piece. Walt Disney's claim to fame were some of the incredible risks that he took, and his near Jobsian ability to predict what the consumer wanted.
Taylor Swift's claim to fame is that she is an attractive white woman from affluent parents, who is both highly malleable and a very hard worker.
> Taylor Swift's claim to fame is that she is an attractive white woman from affluent parents, who is both highly malleable and a very hard worker.
You're clearly missing something, because she's many orders of magnitude more successful than nearly every other attractive white woman, etc. No one falls up from mediocrity that meteorically without unique expertise.
I encourage you to write a song on an instrument, and play it at an open mic; you'll remember those annoyed and disappointed faces forever.
I think if you take highly malleable to mean "can seem relatable to a broad swathe of people that she actually shares little in common with through a very American white bread vanilla mix of folk and pop" then that part of the comment is pretty accurate.
I'm so tired of this bullshit narrative. Same argument gets played for Elon Musk. How many millions of attractive white women from affluent parents are there out there trying to excel? Are you really going against that and take away the tremendously focused effort she's put forth for 20+ years? Taylor has taken huge risks and had her share of failures along the way. I remember her playing at fraternity house parties when I was in college.
It is such a harmful fallacy to reduce someone's life work life you have done here.
Im in the "fathers and daughters" camp that Ben Thompson talks about, where over the last ~5 years, Taylor has produced a body of work that is broadly appealing. I enjoy it. My daughter enjoys it. I personally cannot stand Swift's earlier work, seeing as it was written for teenage girls, that makes sense, my daughter loves it, and she cannot stand my weird 90s rock, so we compromise on Swifts new stuff. What Taylor Swift has done, shifting her musical appeal without abandoning her fan base, is super impressive and potentially unprecedented at this scale. Maybe Michael Jackson or Elvis level of mastery of entertainment.
> Taylor Swift's claim to fame is that she is an attractive white woman from affluent parents, who is both highly malleable and a very hard worker.
Swift's success is about much more than that. Fundamentally, she is targeting a market segment her competitors have left wide open. Her persona-- a hard working, self-deprecating, people pleasing young woman trying to navigate relationships--is immensely relatable to a huge number of young millennial women. That's especially true because Millennials are just more square than Boomers or Gen X. They are more inclined to follow social expectations, and have fewer vices than Boomers or Gen X at the same age. Swift's clean lyrics thus stand out in comparison to her contemporaries.
That also makes her more appealing across generations. I've been a Taylor Swift fan since the beginning, and I'm happy to spend $$$ taking my 10 year old daughter to one of her concerts. I'd never do the same with someone like Ariana Grande or Lizzo or even Beyonce, whose music is more sexualized and profane.
You should watch Miss Americana. Swift runs her operation like a business. It's quite amazing to watch.
It typically increases the opportunities an individual has in their life; it's reasonable to assume it was a factor in her achieving fame in the first place.
But that’s not what makes her famous (fans don’t say, “oh that rich chick”) Just as George Foreman’s claim to fame isn’t coming from a poor family (though he did).
That’s still not her “claim to fame”, as the OP phrases it. She’s famous for her music, not her wealth. A better fit for the OP is someone that is “famous for being famous”.
I think that's a poor reading of Swift & her team. They've clearly got a rock-solid understanding of supply & demand, and other economic concepts, to the extent that their behaviour subverts textbook economic thinking.
Spotify acts like a textbook perfectly competitive marketplace: all actors have perfect information, there are no monopolies, the market price for all items is the same, and all vendors are price-takers (the platform controls the price). Within this framework, Scooter Braun's masters of Swift's work, and Swift's "(Taylor's Version)" re-recordgins are homogeneous products. A textbook reading of this setting should assert that, through supply & demand, both versions should attract an even split of consumption. But most consumers willingly choose to listen to Taylor's re-recordings[1] over Braun's masters.
[1] https://www.billboard.com/lists/taylor-swift-taylors-version...