
Taylor Swift Is an Inspiration for Us All
Everything you need to know about why you should like her.

1. Itās me. Iām the Problem.
The world is full of serious problems right now but Iām going to take a point of personal privilege to talk about Taylor Swift.
I went to the Eras concert movie this weekend with my two daughters and it was great.
And by āgreatā I mean supremely inspiring on an intellectual, emotional, and spiritual level.
Let me explain.
I like Swift as an artist. Sheās an excellent songwriter and a gifted performer.1 But what I love about herāwhat I find genuinely inspiringāis her approach to her career and her willingness to fight the larger forces in the music industry.
Historically, the music industry is a wicked business.
Record companies, agents, and producers use their standing as capital holders and middlemen to take advantage of the musicians who actually make the product: From ārace recordsā and the exploitation of African-American musicians, to Col. Tom Parker sucking Elvis dry, to Epic Records not releasing Aimee Mann from her contract even though they didnāt want her albums, the story is always the same: An individual artist can make music for free. But if they want to turn their art into a career, then they have to relinquish controlāand a great deal of the value they createāto the companies that own the infrastructure.
Taylor Swift had the guts to challenge this system and beat it.
Swift has wanted to be a musician pretty much her entire life. She was making demo tapes when she was 11; at 13 she signed a development deal with RCA. The idea was that sheād write songs and periodically RCA would check in to see if they liked her work enough to give her a recording contract.
Hereās the story from a 2009 profile:
After a year Swift had to play her new songs for the assembled topbrass at RCA. āBasically, there were three things that were going to happen. Either they were going to drop me, or shelve me - that's kind of like putting me in cold storageāor give me a record deal. Of course, the only one of those that you want is the record deal. But they announced they were going to shelve me, and āmonitor my progressā until I was 18.ā
As far as she was concerned, this was just as bad as being dropped. āI mean, I was 14,ā she says, her voice arching upwards in indignation. āI genuinely felt that I was running out of time. I'd written all these songs and I wanted to capture these years of my life on an album while they still represented what I was going through.ā
So she did something unprecedented in Nashville: she walked away from the biggest record label in town. At the same time, she told Sony not to bother selling any of her songs as she wanted to sing them herself. After setting up a showcase concert herself, she was the first artist signed [to Big Machine Records, which was] set up by a former DreamWorks executive named Scott Borchetta.
That line about ārunning out of timeāāat 14āis absolute gold. Swift had an amazing sense of assurance and understanding that she was worth more than the record company was saying and that she didnāt need their permission to unlock it.
One of my mantras is that There is no permission structure for entrepreneurialism. It took me a long time to see this truth, because I was a Company Kidāthe kind of boy always worrying about what the teacher, or admissions officer, or other assorted gatekeepers would let me do with my life.
Taylor Swift figured this all out at 14.
Swiftās next big fight came in 2014. Streaming was changing the economics of the music industry so that another capital holderāthis time the streaming platformsāwas able to exploit artists, too.
First, Swift pulled her entire catalogue from Spotify, because, as she explained,
Iām not willing to contribute my lifeās work to an experiment that I donāt feel fairly compensates the writers, producers, artists, and creators of this music. And I just donāt agree with perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free.
A year later Apple Music offered a free three month trial to users in an attempt to get them to sign up for the serviceābut during this period it did not pay artists any royalties for their work. Appleās view was: āWeāre using your work to get them to pay us, but until we get paid, you donāt get paid.ā
Swift wrote an open letter telling Apple that she wouldnāt let her album 1989 be on the service because of this policy. Apple changed the policy the next day.
In 2017 Swift allowed her music to come back to Spotifyābut only after they created a new-release window that increased revenue for artists.
The best Swift fight came in 2019.
After she completed her original recording contract with Big Machine Records, Swift signed with another label, Republic Records.2
By the terms of most recording contracts, the label owns the āmastersāāthe original studio master sessionsāof music the artist recorded while under contract. After Swift left Big Machine, she attempted to buy back the masters of the five albums she had recorded while under contract with them.
But the company wouldnāt sell.
So Swift decided to re-record those albums as āTaylorās Versions.ā She would own these re-recordings completely. And by signaling to her audience that āTaylorās Versionsā were the preferred canon, she destroyed the value of the original masters. It was an epic act of rebellion; pure Cersei Lannister.
If youāre new here, this newsletter is usually just for members of Bulwark+. And usually itās about politics. But we do lots of culture at The Bulwark and you can sign up to get nearly all of it for freeāwith no ads or anythingāif you hit us up here.
Okay, back to T-Swizzle.
One of my favorite musical microgenres is songs about struggles with the recording industry. Aimee Mann is, obviously, the queen of this set. But the single best entry in the space might be Cypress Hillās ā(Rock) Superstarā:
You should listen to the whole thing, because the underlying story is that being a rock star is just a job. As B-Real explains, itās a fun jobābut itās still a job.
There have been better musicians and song writers than Taylor Swift, but nobody has ever been better at the job of rock star than she is. Thatās because she intuited that her recording industry āpartnersā were actually her enemies and that she needed to find a way to subjugate them.
She accomplished this by taking ownership of her audience.
Swift worked very hard to forge a deep connection with the people who buy her music. She wrote music that spoke to them, of course, but she also cultivated them and treated them like fellow passengers on her personal journey. She brought them insideāor at least inside a constructed a diorama of her life which her audience took to be the real thing.
Itās a lot like kayfabe in professional wrestling: In Taylor Swiftās world itās impossible to know whatās a work and whatās a shoot.
This isnāt a criticism. Most of pop music involves myth-making.3 The difference is that nearly all of the time itās the record companies who make up the backstories.4 Taylor Swift wrote her own script.
Swift figured out that it isnāt enough to write catchy songs. If youāre only a good singer/songwriter, then youāll be at the mercy of the larger forces in the industry.
So while the first half of her job was art, the second half was commerce: She had to build her own audience and then forge a connection with it so strong that she could command it.5 Kind of like a cult?
And if weāre being honest, the Swifties are cult-like. And that isnāt a criticism either! Because Swift has used her powers mostly for good.
Even at the artistic level, Swift used her audienceās loyalty not to jam bland product down their throats, but to give herself the freedom to explore multiple genres and grow herself as an artist.
Itās important to understand that she was only able to make that journey as an artist because she mastered the business side of her job.
The Eras Tour is the culmination of Swiftās ownership of her career. She attempted to bend Ticketmasterāa notoriously rapacious companyāto her will by having them use a āverified fanā program that would get tickets directly into the hands of end-users and put a cap on reselling.
It didnāt work. But this time, the fault was Swiftās: She simply had too many fans. On the day tickets went on sale, Ticketmaster prepared for 1.5 million people to hit their website. Instead, 14 million people tried to get in the door. The entire tour sold out in a day and in the end the resellers made a fortune, with the average ticket on the open market going for roughly $3,800.6
All told, Eras became the highest grossing tour in U.S. history, taking in $1.4 billion in ticket sales and generating an estimated $4.6 billion in excess consumer spending surrounding the shows.
Itās like Swift ran her own private stimulus program for post-COVID America.
In the end, thatās what I love about Taylor Swift. She believed in herself and she did the work. In a business full of sharks and bullies, she beat the house.
And her success has turned out to be good for all of us.
2. Biden and Israel
The Jerusalem Post says that Joe Biden has set a new standard for U.S. support of Israel. Across Israel billboards thanking Biden for his words and actions have popped up. And over the weekend a Marist poll showed two-thirds of Americans think itās important for Biden to be publicly supporting Israel.
That same poll also asked Americans how they think Biden is handling the crisis so far.
Now, are you ready? Put your coffee down.
In this poll 52 percent of respondents disapprove of Bidenās handling of the crisis.
In sum:
A supermajority of Americans think itās important for Biden to support Israel.
Biden has supported Israel to such a degree that Israelis are impressed and publicly grateful.
Also, a majority of Americans disapprove of what Biden has done with regard to Israel.
Put this in the āWhat do you people wantā file along with āitās like the Great Depression but boat sales are through the roofā and āour schools are a disaster, but parents with kids like their schools.ā
3. Texas
This is the story of two white men who go around Texas looking for defective property titles and then suing to acquire the land. Most of the titles they target are for what is known as āheirsā property,ā a particular form of real estate born in the South in the aftermath of the Civil War. These two men are so successful that they are able to find a piece of property on which the owner has paid taxes, every year, for decades, and then strip him of it for a few hundred dollars.
Itās the kind of story that shows why we need magazines like Texas Monthly:
The Smithsā tract was heirsā property, land handed down from generation to generation without the use of wills. This form of ownership is not unusual in Black communities, where access to attorneysāand often the funds to pay themāhas historically been scarce. Much of the acreage held by Black families in Brazos County and throughout the South is heirsā property, a legacy of the regionās poverty but also of the lack of trust in white attorneys and the court system during the Jim Crow era.
Heirsā property tends to become more and more diffuse as new generations have children. Eventually any individual heir may own only a tiny percentage of the land, known as an āundivided interest,ā not unlike holding a few shares of stock in a company. Lawrenceās cousinās suit against him had demonstrated that heirsā property was a tenuous form of ownership. But Curtis Capps was no rogue family memberāhe represented something far more formidable. . . .
Cappsās manner was brusque and, to Lawrenceās mind, arrogant. He had already secured most of the Anna Hackney tract as a result of a recent judgment in another lawsuit and was now suing Lawrence and his fellow Hackney heirs to clear up his title to the land. According to Cappsās research at the county clerkās office, Hackney never owned as much of Petersburg Settlement as her heirs thought she did, and many of the deeds created in conjunction with the tract over the years were faulty. He offered $3,000 for Lawrenceās share of the land, plus $10,000 more if he would persuade the other heirs to sell their shares. āIām going to get it all eventually anyway,ā he said.
Lawrence was insulted. He had long assumed heād sell someday; real estate agents perked up whenever he mentioned he owned property southeast of College Station, where new subdivisionsāsome with million-dollar homesāhad been creeping steadily toward Millican, the old railroad town where Lawrence was born. Land in that part of the county was going for at least $5,000 an acre and in some cases twice that, which meant his familyās parcel was worth as much as $360,000. . . . .
Capps asked the court for whatās known as a partition, a proceeding in which a tract is apportioned among its various owners. In this case, the judge determined there was no fair way to divide the 3.6 acres among Smith and his fellow heirs and instead ordered it to be sold, so that each heir could be compensated in cash. Capps then purchased the 3.6 acres himself, completing his takeover of the Anna Hackney tract. The district clerkās office sent Lawrence a check for his share of the sale proceeds: $635.
Just like that, his landārepresenting a significant portion of his familyās wealthāwas gone. Lawrence wasnāt alone. As he came to understand in the years that followed, Capps and Youngkin had targeted heirsā property all over the Brazos Valley. Black land ownership was under siege. . . .
[T]he tenuous nature of heirsā property, which makes up whatās estimated to be more than one third of Black-owned land in the South, continues to erode Black wealth. The USDA has identified heirsā property as the leading cause of involuntary land loss for African Americans, making it a major contributor to the wealth gap between white and Black America. . . .
A typical Capps case begins with contacting an heir, frequently one who is unaware that they have inherited an interest in the targeted tract. Carolyn Waldon, a retired Bryan ISD counselor, said a representative of Capps met with her elderly mother-in-law, Bertha, in 2016, inquiring about fifty acres not far from Millican. Bertha, who had been diagnosed with dementia, had no idea she was an heir to the property. āShe was told her portion of the land wasnāt even big enough to park a car on,ā Waldon said. Bertha signed away her interest on the spot for $1,200. Waldon worried her mother-in-law had been taken advantage of.
Brad Smith has heard similar stories from members of several other families, who received letters from Capps threatening suit over Petersburg Settlement land. āCapps tells you, āYou know, your uncle has already sold his interest, and your cousins have all sold. Weāve got your check here too, and we just need you to sign these papers,āāā he said. āYouāre talking about someone who may only have $1,000 in the bank, and here is someone offering them a few thousand for some land they might not have seen since they were a child. Itās like they won the lottery.ā
Read the whole thing. Itās one of the clearest accounts of structural racismāor legacy racism, or whatever you want to call itāthat youāll ever see.
My own preferences are slightly more obscure. My favorite band? You probably havenāt heard of them. š
Why did Swift sign with Republic? Because itās a division of Universal and Universal owned a large stake in Spotify. Swiftās contract with Republic (1) gives her total ownership of her work, including her masters; and (2) required Universal to share with artists proceeds of any sale of their Spotify holdings.
The White Stripes, for instance, sold themselves as a brother-sister act, even though they were boyfriend and girlfriend.
If you have time, settle down and read the definitive story on this phenomenon in a 2003 New Yorker piece called āThe Money Note.ā
Thereās a lesson in this for every creator, everywhere: The most important thing in the world is for you to own your audience.
I would not choose to spend $3,800 to attend a Taylor Swift concert. But having seen the concert film I can say with some confidence that in a world in which I had spent $3,800 to see the show, I would have come away feeling like I got my moneyās worth.
Iām a 66-year-old who got turned on to Taylor by a couple of my children in the last 18 months and now consider myself a total Swiftie. One of those children lives and works in KC and the LGBT homeless shelter where they work was recently the beneficiary of a sizable contribution by Taylor to their essential work. An admirable human being and artist.
Taylor represents everything good about being a great American and a decent person. Her generosity, hard work ethic, entrepreneurship, and modesty are just a few of her attributes. I am not a listener of Taylor Swift music, but I learned a lot about her this past summer when millions of people flocked to see her perform. I cannot say enough about how much I admire her kindness, empathy, and courage. Taylor has inspired an entire generation and she models how to behave towards her parents and her employees. The maturity she exudes in all situations is astounding. Thank you JVL for being such a great girl Dad. XO ItsMissDenise