Taylor Swift makes Apple crumble
The biggest technology company in the world, Apple, wanted to stream artists on its new music service without paying royalties. Taylor Swift, the 25- year-old country music turned pop star, beloved by teenaged girls the world over, told them no and within
The youngest ever person on Forbes’s most powerful women list is not a woman to cross.
How did Taylor Swift, at 25, become a pop star so influential she could get the world’s biggest tech company to change a policy the combined might of the record industry could not reverse?
Apple should have known Swift was trouble. Her 2015 hit Bad Blood takes a swipe at a fellow pop star, assumed to be Katy Perry. Its video – 231 million YouTube hits and counting – features Swift teaming up with a small army of female superstars, Cindy Crawford and Ellie Goulding among them, to wreak revenge on her female rival.
2012’s We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together found Swift publicly berating a former boyfriend, reputed to be either Jake Gyllenhaal, the film star, or Harry Styles, the One Direction singer – or both. The youngest ever person on Forbes’s most powerful women list is not a woman to cross.
The key to Swift’s appeal, and her influence, is her ability to seem like the best friend to each and every one of her millions of fans. Less steely and confrontational than Madonna, less determined to present herself as a serious woman of art than Lady Gaga, Swift has managed, through a combination of catchy songs and an image based on being pretty and approachable rather than sexy and glamorous, to give voice to the voiceless.
When Tina Fey and Amy Poehler mocked her reputation for serial dating at the 2013 Golden Globes, Swift spoke up against "mean girls", and for anyone who has been bullied. When magazines focused on her relationships rather than her music she denounced it as "very sexist".
She has an ability to make her life relevant to her fans, to dissolve, through adept use of social media and the power of image, the distance between star and audience. She is also an unlikely superstar, coming not from the usual channels of TV talent shows or fame academies but from the world of country music.
Born in Pennsylvania, Swift was nine when the songs of Shania Twain, the country singer, sent her down a musical path. By 12 she had a New York-based manager and was making regular trips to Nashville, where the family moved two years later to help her break into the music scene.
After attending professional songwriting sessions, Swift released her eponymous debut album at 16. Expressing familiar adolescent concerns like young love and the nightmare of high school cliques in a straight Nashville country style, 2006’s Taylor Swift was a modest hit, peaking at No 5 on the Billboard charts.
Swift’s power and influence really began when she moved out of country and into pop with her
fourth album, 2012’s Red. Its lead single and her first number one, We Are Never Ever Getting Back
Together, gave her universal appeal. It put her firmly on the side of the girls.
For her next album, 2014’s 1989, Swift cemented her reputation as best friend to the world by holding highly publicised listening parties for a few lucky fans at her New York apartment, at which she served them pizza.
The album’s songs Blank Space and Shake It Off combine Springsteen-style 80s rock with pop and dance music, all wrapped up in lyrics the average teenager can relate to. According to one of
1989’s co-writers, Jack Antonoff, it worked because Swift’s empathy for fans is real.
"She stood out by being a sweet, normal person among abnormal celebrities," says Antonoff. "I work with a lot of artists and they’re rarely so down to earth."
Nonetheless, Swift does occupy a rarefied world. Forbes estimates her net worth at US$400 million, she dates Calvin Harris, the superstar DJ.
And, from now on, Swift will be remembered as the woman who took on the biggest company in the world – and won.