TAYLOR MADE
She’s a billionaire, Time’s Person of the Year and queen bee to her loyal ‘Swifties’. Ahead of this month’s tour, we explore the Taylor Swift phenomenon and her special relationship with Australia
The first clue that Taylor Swift would become the greatest disrupter of pop culture of her generation and an entertainment billionaire came via nascent social media platform MySpace. While the then 16-year-old American singer and songwriter was already blowing up America’s country music scene with her debut self-titled album in 2006, her influence was stretching far beyond Nashville.
Before she arrived in Australia for her first shows in 2009 off the back of her second album, Fearless, she had proven to be an uncanny marketing machine, amassing more than 20 million followers worldwide.
The rising star, who signed her first songwriting publishing deal at 14 and recording deal at 15, in 2005, struck a resounding chord with the burgeoning online music community of young women who may not have been conventional country music fans but connected with the aching vulnerability of songs including Tim McGraw, Teardrops On My Guitar, and Should’ve Said No.
Equally as pivotal in her rise through the ranks was the tightly knit Nashville music community. Instead of thumbing their noses at the shiny new kid in town, a sequin-loving melody machine who wrote her own songs, big stars including Tim McGraw, Faith Hill and Brad Paisley sang her praises and booked her to open on their big stages.
Keith Urban was one of her early champions, taking her on the road in 2009. He identified her undeniable talent after witnessing her confident performances and connection with the fans.
“She was playing way past where she was,” Urban says.
“She was way into the future. You could tell.”
It was that connection with the fan army – who would become known as Swifties – which really changed the game. Swift didn’t treat them as a number among millions. She redefined the relationship between fan and pop star to be personal and intimate, sharing the minutiae of her life via social media as if it was her diary. Her feelings were their feelings.
She converted them into master sleuths, sprinkling clues called Easter eggs through her social media posts, lyrics, music videos and costumes to signal her next move or reveal hidden meanings in her songs.
“I wanted to do something that incentivised fans to read the lyrics because my lyrics are what I’m most proud of out of everything that I do,” she told TV host Jimmy Fallon in 2021.
And unlike any pop star on the planet before her or since her rise, she has kept her most devoted fans close via “Taylurking”.
Those she identified via trawling through social media platforms as being the most loyal, committed and deserving would receive invites into her homes for secret listening parties or generous gifts. She baked them cookies and paid off student loans. She turned up to weddings, congratulated them on graduating university or played songs at the bedside of fans in hospital.
Surprise boxes at the front door aside, it is Swift’s music which has always remained the unifying factor of her success.
Unlike other pop stars who suffer a dip in their chart fortunes because fans love “your old stuff better than your new stuff”, Swifties have been the exception, thrilled to embrace her musical reinventions through the Red, 1989, folklore, evermore and Midnights records.
Each cultural shift was also acknowledged and rewarded by her peers which is remarkable in that awards voters don’t have a reputation for necessarily equating chart success with artistry.
Swift is the most-awarded artist of the American Music Awards and Billboard awards with 40 trophies from each and holds the record for Album of the Year wins at the Grammy Awards (three) and most Video of the Year gongs at the MTV Video Music Awards. Remember the Kanye moment?
She is also a consistent advocate for artist rights, taking her music off Spotify in 2014 in protest at the piddling per-stream royalties paid to musicians.
“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,” she wrote in a Wall Street Journal oped explaining her move.
Her reaction to the master recordings of her early albums being sold to her nemesis, music entrepreneur and Justin Bieber manager Scooter Braun, was to re-record them with the “Taylor’s Versions” reaping billions of streams in competition with the original releases.
Taylor Swift Inc reached its pinnacle – and billionaire status – in 2023, courtesy of Midnights, Fearless (Taylor’s Version), 1989 (Taylor’s Version), the Eras world tour and the Eras Tour concert film.
And there were two major signposts that her power as one of the world’s most influential people seems to be growing rather than suffering any decline due to over-exposure.
The first – she adorned the cover of Time magazine as their Person of the Year 2023.
And the second being the flow-on effect to television ratings and merchandise sales when she started dating NFL star, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce.
Unlike her previous long-term relationship with British actor Joe Alwyn, Swift appears happy for her romance with the football champion to play out in front of the world.
She was filmed racing off stage to jump into his arms after a concert in Buenos Aires after changing the lyrics to her hit Karma in tribute to her lover. “Karma is the guy on the Chiefs coming straight home to me,” she sang.
Fans are crunching the timelines to work out if Swift will make a quick dash from the Oceania leg of her Eras Tour to fly from Japan to Las Vegas to see him play in the Super Bowl on February 12.
And then she heads to Melbourne to kick off her seven sold-out Australian shows – three at the MCG on February 16th to 18th, then four at Sydney’s Accor Stadium on the 23rd to 26th.
Ahead of this return to Australia, we relive some of her wildest dreams down under.
BACK IN THE BEGINNING
Aussie Swifties gave the rising American country pop crossover artist her first No.1 single in the world, for Love Story in March 2009. The then teen pop princess had already built a substantial following on MySpace with 20 million followers
THE AUSSIE SWIFT SQUAD
Early champions of the singer among the tightknit Nashville musical community included Keith Urban and Nicole Kidman.
Urban took Swift out on the road to open his Escape Together world tour in 2009 and he immediately identified her undeniable talent after witnessing her confident performances and connection with the fans. Swift became fast friends with Urban and Kidman.
“Keith and Nicole have been wonderful to me,” she told me in a 2010 interview. “Both of them have this natural friendliness and a natural kindness that I really love.
“Also, Keith Urban is not just an influence on me at a personal level, he has a professional influence on me as well – he’s been a good example to me of how I feel an artist should be.”
Swift also championed Australian singer songwriter Vance Joy to the world, and booked him to open her 1989 world tour in 2015.
THE POP QUEEN AND THE MOVIE STAR
What a brief but heady whirlwind was Swiftston or Hiddleswift or whatever that was when a pop comet and the English actor collided.
Swift and Tom Hiddleston’s three-month romance enjoyed its Gold Coast era in mid-2016 after the pair hung out at the Met Gala ball in May, blew up the internet with photos of them making out on the beach near her Rhode Island estate in June, met each other’s parents and holidayed in Rome.
There was blanket coverage of the couple when Swift accompanied her beau to Australia in July 2016 as he filmed Thor: Ragnarok with Chris Hemsworth at the Movie World studios on the Gold Coast. The dynamic duo enjoyed a dinner date in the Queensland tourist hub, a private screening of the rebooted Ghostbusters, starring Hemsworth, with key cast members, and – from her luxury penthouse abode on Broadbeach – Swift published her incendiary response to her ongoing social media feud with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian over his infamous Famous track and its “bitch” lyric.
POSTCARDS FROM AUSTRALIA
Downtime, playtime, bush and beach time – Swift has ticked off all the Australian tourism must-dos. She’s hugged koalas, petted kangaroos, scoffed packets of Tim Tams, done the Bondi to Bronte walk and a Sydney Harbour cruise and shut down Movie World on the Gold Coast so she and Swift squad captain Blake Lively could hang out on the rides.
Swift celebrated her 26th birthday in Australia and the end of the 1989 tour with a holiday on Hamilton Island, taking her crew with her for some downtime. But there’s rarely any rest for this pop workaholic, who also performed an intimate Nova Red Room show for 100 lucky fans on the island.
During her Reputation tour in 2018, Swift went bush, hiding out with her mum Andrea at the late Michael Gudinski’s property at Mt Macedon in Victoria, sharing Instagram photos of her bushwalking and playing scrabble.
The Reputation album may feature again in Australia, with Swifties hopeful she will release Reputation (Taylor’s Version) from the stage of one of her Melbourne or Sydney shows. They also hope to see her football hero joining her on the Australian tour. Regardless, they’ll be happy just to be in the orbit of this superstar for a few very special days.