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SOUND AND IMAGES

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Taylor Swift has become such a music-industry phenomenon that the only artist in the world able to compete with her isn’t even human: It’s Elsa, the cartoon ice princess from Disney’s Frozen, who sang the smash hit “Let It Go.” Even with Elsa on her heels, Swift still had the No. 1 album in the United States in 2014, with her 3.66-million-selling 1989 edging out the 3.57 million copies sold of the Frozen soundtrack. No other artist was even close; the next-biggest release was Sam Smith’s smash release In the Lonely Hour, which reached album sales of 1.2 million in 2014.1

Since her debut release of Taylor Swift in 2006, at the age of sixteen, Swift has become one of the best-selling singer-songwriters—not only of the past decade but of all time, transitioning from a country-based artist to a top pop-chart star. Her songs often tell personal stories and have gained a stronger feminist perspective over time, exemplified in such hits as “Love Story,” “You Belong with Me,” “Fifteen,” “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” “I Knew You Were Trouble,” “Shake It Off,” “Blank Space,” and “Bad Blood.”

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Swift’s career has blossomed in the midst of a changing music industry, and she has been a pioneer in terms of maintaining control of her own career. Her first mark of independence was when she signed in 2005 with a new independent music label in Nashville, Big Machine Records. Swift, along with label-mates Rascal Flatts and Tim McGraw, have propelled Big Machine to its current status as one of the most significant independent labels in the country. Even with her initial success, Swift has stuck with the independent label for five albums, never seeing the need to jump to a major label. (She has one more album to go under her current contract with Big Machine.)

Swift has also developed unique sponsorships for her album sales. For example, Target stores carried special editions of her last three recordings, adding extra promotion to her marketing efforts alongside her celebrity endorsement deals with Subway, Diet Coke, Papa Johns, Walgreens, Keds, Elizabeth Arden, and Cover Girl.

Yet ultimately Swift’s success comes down to the connection with her fans. She is the only artist to sell more than one million copies of an album in its debut week three times in the past fifteen years (with Speak Now in 2010, Red in 2012, and 1989 in 2014). In the first week of 1989’s release, its sales accounted for 22 percent of all album sales in the United States. Swift is such a dominant force in music today that Bloomberg Businessweek published a story with the headline “Taylor Swift Is the Music Industry.”2

With that success comes a certain amount of power, and Swift has wielded it to advocate for fair compensation for artists. In 2014, she removed her music from the streaming site Spotify, becoming the biggest among many artists dissatisfied with the company’s low compensation for music creators. “I’m not willing to contribute my life’s work to an experiment that I don’t feel fairly compensates the writers, producers, artists, and creators of this music,” she told Yahoo! “And I just don’t agree with perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free.”3 Swift also wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal reinforcing her views on the industry.4

In 2015, Swift took on an even bigger music company: Apple. In a post to her Tumblr blog titled “To Apple, Love Taylor,” Swift wrote, “I’m sure you are aware that Apple Music will be offering a free three-month trial to anyone who signs up for the service. I’m not sure you know that Apple Music will not be paying writers, producers, or artists for those three months. I find it to be shocking, disappointing, and completely unlike this historically progressive and generous company.”5

Though Swift stood to miss out on plenty of revenue without payment for trial uses, she said she was speaking up for artists who didn’t have the power to do so. “These are not the complaints of a spoiled, petulant child. These are the echoed sentiments of every artist, writer and producer in my social circles who are afraid to speak up publicly because we admire and respect Apple so much.”6 Although just in her mid-twenties, Swift is assured enough to take on the biggest company in music. And like the strong young woman in her song lyrics, she isn’t willing to back down.

In less than one day, Apple capitulated and agreed to pay artists royalties for the three-month Apple Music trial period.

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THE MEDIUM OF SOUND RECORDING has had an immense impact on our culture. The music that helps shape our identities and comforts us during the transition from childhood to adulthood resonates throughout our lives, and it often stirs debate among parents and teenagers, teachers and students, and politicians and performers, many times leading to social change. Throughout its history, popular music has been banned by parents, school officials, and even governments under the guise of protecting young people from corrupting influences. As far back as the late eighteenth century, authorities in Europe, thinking that it was immoral for young people to dance close together, outlawed waltz music as “savagery.” Between the 1920s and the 1940s, jazz music was criticized for its unbridled and sometimes free-form sound and the unrestrained dance crazes (such as the Charleston and the jitterbug) it inspired. Rock and roll from the 1950s onward and hip-hop from the 1980s to today have also added their own chapters to the age-old musical battle between generations.

In this chapter, we will place the impact of popular music in context and:

As you consider these topics, think about your own relationship with popular music and sound recordings. Who was your first favorite group or singer? How old were you, and what was important to you about this music? How has the way you listen to music changed in the past five years? For more questions to help you think through the role of music in our lives, see “Questioning the Media” in the Chapter Review.