Posted on 05/23/2015 11:50:45 AM PDT by drewh
Over the last few years, Taylor Swift has become one of the two or three biggest pop stars in the world. She has accumulated no fewer than four homes (including a $3.5 million place in Beverly Hills and a $20 million Tribeca penthouse) and drawn enormous press and media attention. She’s still on the cover of lots of magazines and we’ll probably see her there far into the future.
On its release last year, her “1989” record became the biggest selling album in more than a decade, at a time in which record sales have been way down. She became, according to Business Insider, “the first woman to have three albums sell more than 1 million copies in a single week.” The album has now sold more than 4 million – the kind of number we thought, in the age of file-sharing, we’d never hear again.
Swift’s current tour will take her to stadiums all over the world, including Metlife Stadium in New Jersey, capacity 82,600. Her net worth is roughly $200 million – that’s about 3,550 times the median net worth of an American household. By every available measure, she seems to be doing pretty well, and at 25, she’s probably just getting started with her world domination.
But to the New York Times, she is, apparently, an “underdog.” The paper of record used the term twice in its review of her show in a relatively intimate 13,000-seat arena in Louisiana and pulled it out for the headline as well: “On Taylor Swift’s ‘1989’ Tour, the Underdog Emerges as Cool Kid.”
Well, Taylor Swift may be a lot of things, but we’re not really sure “underdog” is one of them. Let’s back up a little bit.
Like a lot of country singers – that’s how she first broke in – Taylor Swift grew up on a farm. It wasn’t a subsistence farm in the rough part of Kentucky but a Christmas-tree farm in Pennsylvania. “Her mother worked in finance,” a New Yorker story says, “and her father, a descendant of three generations of bank presidents, is a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch. (He bought the tree farm from a client.)” In Swift’s hometown, she told the magazine’s Lizzie Widdicombe, “it mattered what kind of designer handbag you brought to school.”
So let’s acknowledge that she began life with a slight leg up on the privilege escalator. But the playing field is about a get a lot less level: “When she was ten, her mother began driving her around on weekends to sing at karaoke competitions,” the New Yorker tells us. “Then she persuaded her mother to take her to Nashville during spring break to drop off her karaoke demo tapes around Music Row, in search of a record deal; they didn’t succeed, but the experience convinced Swift that she needed a way to stand out.”
When Swift was 14, her father relocated to Merrill Lynch’s Nashville office as a way to help dear Taylor break into country music. As a sophomore in high school, she got a convertible Lexus. Around the same time, her dad bought a piece of Big Machine, the label to which Swift signed.
This is hardly the first case of stage parents or a rich kid breaking into the music world. And along the way, Swift has worked hard, behaved reasonably nicely, and so on. But why are we describing her as someone who’s triumphed over adversity?
Part of this is because of a critical/journalist school that worships money, popularity and fame: Unlike previous generations of critics, or the traditional journalistic mission to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” Poptimists like the New York Times’ Jon Caramanica don’t buy the old small-is-beautiful premise. And what better way to reconcile the contradiction – to inject a bit of rebel cool into the story – than to make a millionaire daughter of the plutocracy into an underdog?
Specifically, the review refers to a much-quoted song, “We are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” which is about her relationship with one or another celebrity actor or singer or Jonas Brother. Here’s Caramanica:
In the song, she’s lashing out at a dunderheaded ex: “You would hide away and find your peace of mind/ With some indie record that’s much cooler than mine.”
Indie rock – and punk and alt-country, and left-of-the-dial R&B and related genres that are uncomfortable with corporations or consumerism – is exactly the kind of thing an offspring of Wall Street like Taylor Swift is not going to respond to. So does her dissing a celebrity ex make her into an underdog? To a poptimist, maybe.
But this kind of thing is especially offensive since there have actually been plenty of musicians who really were underdogs.
Johnny Cash was raised by poor cotton farmers during the Great Depression. John Lennon’s mother and father abandoned him. Jimi Hendrix’s early life was a nightmare that involved shoplifting food so he could eat. For decades, the average blues and country musician came from poverty or close to it. Billie Holiday was jailed, as a teenager, for prostitution. And so on.
And even for the musicians raised middle-class – many were – a life in music has involved real risk and suffering. The punk band the Mekons has bounced up and down, from label to label, for decades. Jason Molina, who made transcendent records on tiny labels with Magnolia Electric Company until alcoholism took him down two years ago, never found a substantial audience. Chan Marshall of Cat Power recently filed for bankruptcy. In a post-label world where piracy has shredded artist’s earnings, just about everyone trying to play music professionally below the superstar label could be considered an underdog.
Somebody should tell the New York Times: Just because the Jack Black character in “High Fidelity” doesn’t think you’re cool doesn’t mean you’re an underdog. He doesn’t call the shots anymore, and really, he never did.
Scott Timberg is a staff writer for Salon, focusing on culture. A longtime arts reporter in Los Angeles who has contributed to the New York Times, he runs the blog Culture Crash. He's the author of the new book, "Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class."
But what used to take million dollar studios and talented musicians, like The Wrecking Crew to do, can now be done from a home studio with music software.
That’s where the real pain is. It takes a lot of work to break a new act. You have to tour tour tour, work work work. It’s more difficult now for many reasons. Most debut or sophomore record acts are now forced to tour in “festival” type bundles of five or six acts. Everyone gets maybe 25 minutes of stage fine and a free buritto every night. It’s a dead end.
Because this is a dead end bands prefer not to do it. Clubs no longer have enough national acts coming through to justify paying a full time booker/talent buyer. You have waitresses and bartenders part-time booking clubs. They know nothing at all about music or acts that are making headway. It’s all the same to them.
Everyone gets sick of it all and hires some 20 year old nozzle to hit play on his laptop on the weekends and call it EDM. It’s a mess. All of it.
I don’t really care anymore, I got out and got my money. As a consumer though, I know in getting shortchanged.
Sure, tell that to Speilberg when he and YouTube users are turning similar numbers. It’s not the same quality. Not even close.
That's pretty much the way it was in the 60s. It's going 'back to the future.'
Now that’s what makes me laugh, all these people going crazy for some dweeb who presses a button.
But it's "good enough."
Do you seriously think YouTube could get away with playing illegal music? Or Pandora, LastFM, Spotify, or any of the other streaming services that have virtually eliminated the need to purchase music on compact disc? All those services are completely legal.
What happened here was that the music industry decided to cling to a business model that was being rendered extinct by technology and instead of embracing the new technologies, they decided to fight the technology and make enemies of their own customers.
I agree, it is good enough. That’s ok too I guess. I’ve just seen really high level people throw in the towel over the past two years mainly. Really innovative people that dedicated their youth to discipline and creativity. They just can’t take it anymore, it’s too disheartening. The public generally doesn’t care to know the difference between the Space Shuttle and a Roller Blade. Musically speaking of course.
So what if those services are legal? About half the revenue of the music industry has been lost in the past ten years. But it is not legal to download copyrighted music from youtube and possess it. And there are almost limitless ways people can copy music from many sources without paying.
You just pretend that the lost billions are still there for the music industry’s taking, but they’re just too lazy and/or dumb to use the technology and recoup six or seven billion in lost annual revenue.
What you’re saying is beyond ridiculous.
Their lovely “oh so dedicated” customers could give two craps if their hero singer they care SO MUCJ about has to beg their parents to help them with a root canal. They could care less, and it shows.
So half the revenue of the music industry has been lost? So what. It simply got transferred to the innovators who provided a better alternative to obtaining music on an overpriced piece of plastic (the compact disc).
The music industry snoozed. Their loss.
All music is free. You win the argument. Feel free to be “all about dat bass, all about dat bass” for eternity.
Lol, just what I thought. Another one who justifies the theft of music from music creators because some great 'innovator' came up with a method to obtain the music without paying the creator of the music.
So, you agree with me after all your posturing and posing. Music is being stolen on a massive scale.
And all those tapes were not being used for theft. I copied the music from many vinyl albums I owned to tape so they could be played in an automobile. Probably the biggest use of blank tape once tape players were put in cars and trucks.
So not sure what you are inferring by them "stealing music on a massive scale."
Yep, I’d read a few times that the huge album sales of the top acts financed production of albums that didn’t sell well and also the introduction of new acts as you describe. Now about half the revenue is gone along with the huge sales top groups once realized before so many music lovers stop paying for their music.
So, you could figure out how music was being copied illegally on a massive scale before the internet, but you can't figure out how music is being copied illegally on an even more massive scale with the internet?
Music was being copied on a massive scale way before the Internet. Billions of blank cassette tapes were sold during the 1970s. You think consumers were using those to tape themselves talking?
Like I said, much of that blank tape was being used to make legal copies of vinyl recordings people already owned so they could play the tapes in their vehicles.
But any illegal copying in those days was child's play compared to what can be done now. You must be one of the few around who doesn't understand that, and what happened to half the music industries sales revenue over the past ten years.
End of discussion.
It’s not too different from other businesses that are forced to tighten the belt. Risk is done away with. That’s why your only going to see derivatives of previously successful acts. Along with risk, innovation is out as well.
As far as “royalties” from streaming services they are similar to a joke except they’re not funny. They never pay and when they do it’s 1000x less than those old “evil” record companies use to pay.
It’s over. The industry is a joke. It’s been that way forever though. The problem I see now is well beyond the hipsters ability to understand. To keep it simple, there was a time when many musicians were able to barely make ends meet enough to be a full time musician. What you are capable of creating once you take that leap of faith is far greater than what you can create while working 9 to 5. Trust funders and hipsters will never understand why the are musically gutless.
People are shifting away from "owning" music to having virtually all recorded music on demand for a fixed fee. YouTube, Spotify, Pandora and many others are offering that service. Soon Apple will be in the game.
The traditional music industry is seeing declining profits because they continue to resist adapting to the new business model.
By the way, this is quickly happening with movies and TV shows as well. DVD sales are in a tailspin as people would rather see their movies streamed on demand. Nobody cares about owning movies on physical media anymore. Same with TV shows. Many people prefer to stream their TV shows on demand on services like Hulu and Netflix, as opposed to tuning into a TV channel at a specific time.
Feminism is more noxious than communism, and is a rot on western civilization. You cannot be a Rightist and support “girl power.”
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