We know Taylor Swift all too well. Her ubiquity makes her familiar, and familiarity breeds merch, memes, and multipart documentaries such as NBC’s The Swift Effect, a sustained exercise in fake wonderment that is now in its second season and forever in the eighth circle of Dante’s hell, where flatterers are submerged in human excrement.
There’s a well-known line from Hunter S. Thompson: “The music business is a shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.” But Thompson was talking about the TV business. Other people changed the target of his contempt and desire, and then added the punchline. This is about as music business as it gets: a collective celebration of parasitism and copyright theft.
Taylor Swift is the apogee of both the old-time music business and its replacement. This gives people two reasons to resent her. Her success and wealth add two more. We live in a resentful age in which we are spoiled for choice. But T-Swift is generous. She has given her life to her art. A one-woman Brill Building, her product pours forth in cornucopian plenitude. Twelve hit albums in 19 years are the longest winning streak in the history of pop music.
Swift’s closest peer business-wise is J.K. Rowling. Each crawled up the ladder of a long-standing industry by the conventional method: advances and royalties, an album or book every year (every two years when you make it), and the face-aching grind of the endless promo. But as they climbed, digitization dissolved each rung of the ladder beneath their toes, as in a fairy tale or nightmare.
