Taylor Swift is currently one of the most successful musicians ever. But she has also made a name for herself as a shrewd entrepreneur and is not afraid of conflict with corporations.
M.t Taylor Swift is very familiar with records . She has had another one since Monday: She was the first woman ever to win three Grammys in the “Album of the Year” category. This time the prize was awarded to “Folklore” from July 2020.
It is her eighth work and like “Evermore”, which was released almost five months later, with Aaron Dessner from the indie rock band The National and Swift’s long-time colleague Jack Antonoff in the lead. The fact that everyone involved had to work from home due to the pandemic obviously did not harm the factories.
Her success is out of the question anyway – which can be said about Swift’s entire career regardless of personal taste in music: The 31-year-old American is a gifted songwriter and interpreter. But she has also made a name for herself as a shrewd entrepreneur who is aware of her influence and knows how to use it.
Musically, after a phase of high-gloss pop, Swift has now arrived at deliberate indie folk. Her career began in the country mecca of Nashville, where the ambitious teenager wanted to draw attention to herself with her songs. She learned to play the guitar at the age of twelve. As one of the first acts on his newly founded Big Machine Records label, Scott Borchetta signed the then 15-year-old Swift in 2005.
Her father, a banker by profession, acquired a small stake in the label in the course of this. With the contract, the rights to the recordings Swifts released in the future via Big Machine should lie with the label. A quite common constellation at the time, when CDs were still important and, as a result, the distribution of music alone was much more complex than it is today. Borchetta also invested in a completely unknown artist.
Test of strength with Apple and Spotify
The deal should cause a lot of trouble later and is one reason Swift’s next release will be the re-recording of their second album (“Fearless”). In 2008 it gave her a big breakthrough beyond country fans and won her first Grammy in the “Album of the Year” category. In general, the collaboration with Big Machine went well for a long time. The music industry was increasingly struggling, as sales of sound carriers shrank and downloads could not cushion the losses – among other things because piracy was flourishing.
Swift’s 2012 album “Red” still sold well over five million times. “Red” was initially not available on the Spotify streaming service, which was still small at the time . Other stars such as Adele were also not very enthusiastic about the emerging music streaming for a long time.
In the case of Swift, however, it was only a foretaste of what was to come: In 2014, her entire catalog disappeared from the Swedish service, which she justified with her anger over Spotify’s ad-based free version: Valuable things like music shouldn’t be free, she had already mentioned a few months earlier in an article for the “Wall Street Journal”.
A little later, Apple also felt the power of the musician when the company – actually a good partner, as Swift emphasized – launched its attack on Spotify in 2015. Apple Music did not and does not have a free version, but no royalties should be paid to artists or their partners during the three-month trial phase, which is free for users.
Shortly after a Tumblr post from Swift in which she argued that musicians didn’t ask Apple for free iPhones either, the company relented. Spotify, on the other hand, shortly afterwards referred to her rather gallantly as a “start-up without cash flow”, and her music was to be missing from the service until June 2017.