Encore - Taylor Swift: Swiftonomics

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Hello, I'm Zing Sing.

And I'm Simon Jack.

And we're excited to let you know that a new season of Good Bad Billionaire is coming soon.

Yep, we'll be back with brand new episodes on March the 17th.

We've got some big names and even bigger stories coming your way.

But before that, because we know you've been missing us, we're bringing back a couple of our favourite stories from the Good Bad Billionaire archives.

And we're starting with one of the most famous billionaires we've ever talked about, pop star Taylor Swift.

Back in February 2024, when this episode first went out, she had just joined the Billionaire Club and was in the middle of her world-conquering eras tour.

A year later, she's barely been out of the headlines or the charts.

When we recorded this episode, she was the holder of 69 Guinness World Records.

At the last count, she had 118.

Lots of them came from that record-breaking tour, as did lots of her her money.

And she also broke records with her album The Tortured Poets Department which had the most streams of any album on a single day when it was streamed over 300 million times the day it came out in April last year.

Oh and that was her own record she broke too.

Right then let's listen back to our classic Good Bad Billionaire on Taylor Swift.

Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire, the program where each episode we pick a billionaire, find out how they made their money, and then we judge them.

Are they good, bad, or just another billionaire?

I'm Simon Jack, I'm the BBC's business editor.

And I'm Zing Sing, I'm a journalist, author and podcaster.

And this week, a whole new branch of the dismal science of economics, Swift Dynomics.

That is the school of, what, financial thought, pioneered by Taylor Swift.

Incredible.

A woman who can move the dial on whole economies.

I think she even gets name-checked by the Federal Reserve of the US for her contribution to boosting local economies.

And in 2023, she became one of pop music's newly minted billionaires.

And unlike other billionaires we've talked about, she did it through her music.

It wasn't owning companies like Rihanna, for example, have Venti Beauty.

This is straight from the music.

Yep, it is straight from her world-beating ERA's tour, which is still on tour this year and will wrap up sometime at the end of 2024.

But first, let's break down Taylor by numbers.

Her ERA's tour is a massive undertaking, 150 stadium shows across five continents and could make her as much as four billion dollars personally.

So, if you've been living under a rock and you don't know what the ERA's tour is about, it is a retrospective of her 10 studio albums.

And each album has broken almost every record imaginable.

In fact, she currently holds 69 Guinness World Record titles.

Unbelievable.

She's won 12 Grammys, two two private jets.

And all this off the back of a songwriting career.

She wrote her first song at the age of 10.

She's now 34.

Yeah, she has this incredible connection with her fans.

In fact, 53% of all U.S.

adults would call themselves a fan.

It is officially illegal not to be a Taylor Swift fan.

They also have their own name.

They're called Swifty.

So Swifty's, if you're listening now, please go easy on us.

If we say that she's a bad billionaire, we'll get cancelled by the army of Swifty's.

Well, we will reserve judgment until the end of the episode.

She's also tall.

I don't know if you've ever seen her in the flesh.

I saw her at a hotel once in London and she was standing head and shoulders above everyone else.

She's hard to miss.

I actually saw her when she came out during the 1975 concert when she was controversially dating the frontman Matt Healy.

Yeah, her relationships get well chronicled in her music, don't they?

We'll see.

But let's have a listen to a clip of Taylor Swift herself speaking to Clara Ampho for the BBC in 2019.

Your album, Lover, is number one in the UK.

It's number one pretty much everywhere at the moment.

It's been a really, really good time, yeah, with this album.

How satisfying does it feel for you to have this album be number one A, but the first album that you legally own?

This is all your baby.

How good is that feeling?

It's the best.

It's literally the most satisfying feeling in the world

to own this record, to know that, you know, this is something that I've always written all my own music.

I've always made all of my own decisions.

I've always curated absolutely everything about what I do.

But, you know, the fact that I own it, it's just there's something about that that makes it more special than anything I've ever done.

Throughout this portrait we're going to paint of Taylor Swift, one thing keeps coming back is that there's a sort of steely determination, and she kind of manages to turn being slight victim of the industry into a show of strength.

Yeah, exactly.

I think what comes across of Taylor's history is this kind of need for control, right?

Which I think is quite common among billionaires that we've talked about.

You know, she wants to control her public image.

She wants to control the masters of her albums.

She wants to control that songwriting talent.

And I think that there have been points in her career where that kind of need for control has spilled out into the public image and people have kind of turned against her.

But if we're talking about right now, she has never ridden higher than she has at the moment.

She is literally on top of the world.

Probably the most famous person in the world, potentially.

Let's go back to the beginning and go from zero to her first million.

So, Taylor was born in December of 1989 in the suburbs of Pennsylvania, and she was born into a quite wealthy middle-class family.

Her mother worked in finance and became a stay-at-home mum.

Her dad was a stockbroker, and she's actually descended from three generations of bank presidents.

So, we'll get to that when we go to our rags to riches category for sure.

They lived on a Christmas tree farm, they had a beach house on the Jersey Shore.

She assumed she would follow her parents into finance.

And this is the kind of sliding doors moment I would love to see.

Taylor Swift, the stockbroker.

Yeah.

The first album she bought was by Leanne Rhimes, famous country artist.

She then discovered Shania Twain.

And her roots are in country music.

They are.

So she started vocal and acting lessons in New York City by the time she was nine.

And she was already writing songs by the time she was 10 because she was unhappy at school.

She says she had a big group of friends.

Then one day they decided not to like her anymore and she didn't know why.

But luckily, one of the great joys that she puts it about it was it enabled me to have the last word.

And that keeps coming up again and again.

She likes to have the last word in these situations.

So, her mother drove her on weekends to sing at open mic nights, karaoke competitions, and she watched VH1 Behind the Music and learned that Faith Hill, famous country artist, was discovered in Nashville.

So, that's where she thinks she needs to go.

Yeah, so she said she began absolutely non-stop tormenting her parents, begging them on a daily basis to move there.

And finally, in 2001, on spring break, her mum kind of capitulates and finally takes her to Nashville.

I don't know, have you ever been to Nashville?

I have.

And it

is the sort of capital city for country music.

And she went up and down Music Row in Nashville, taking

demo CDs of her songs.

And she said, hi, I'm Taylor.

I'm 11.

I want a record deal.

Call me.

And they all turned her down.

They said, you know, give up your dreams, go home, come back when you're 18.

And in Taylor's words, I chose not to hear that.

Yeah, I wonder how many people will be listening to this.

They passed on Taylor Swift.

That's going to be like the person who said they didn't want to manage the Beatles.

But she wanted to stand out and she's a musician herself.

She learned to play the guitar.

And initially, her mother told Taylor that her fingers were too small to play a 12-string guitar.

As her mum says, that was all it took, don't say never or can't do to Taylor.

And Taylor ended up playing four hours a day.

Her fingers were cracked and bleeding.

She'd tape them up.

She'd keep playing.

But if you see Taylor now, she plays 12 strings.

Yeah, as an amateur guitar player myself, I can tell you that playing a 12 string is much harder than playing a six string.

So I salute her application, her dedication to keep playing it.

Do you think it was Taylor's personality that led her to kind of be this driven or were her parrots pushy?

Feels like it's coming from her, doesn't it?

I don't get the sense that they were the ones doing the pushing, one of those tiger mums with, you know, sort of, you know, hawking their kid around.

It feels like it's coming from her.

So anyway, she starts breaking breaking into the industry proper around 13 she started working with a New York talent manager called Dan Dimtrow and he had been the day-to-day manager for Britney Spears so he's got some experience of hot property and at 13 which is still pretty young she got offered an artist development deal by RCA records which is owned by Sony and what a development deal means is that you're given the time and the money to record but you don't sign on the dotted line for any kind of album.

And her family uprooted itself for Taylor.

So her dad got a transfer to Merrill Lynch's Nashville office.

So the whole family moved from Pennsylvania to Tennessee.

That is quite a big deal, isn't it?

Uprooting yourself to move for a potential burgeoning career.

I mean getting your mum and dad to move house from, you know, and Pennsylvania to Tennessee.

They're very different places.

It's a big move, especially considering she had a brother at the time.

She's basically getting her whole family to upsticks for her.

Okay, so she's all in on the music.

She said Nashville was a really weird existence.

She said she was a school teenager during the day, but in the evenings was writing songs with hit songwriters.

Every Tuesday, she would do a two-hour session with Liz Rose, who was a songwriting partner.

And Liz Rose is basically I was just her editor.

She'd write about what happened in school that day.

And that's interesting.

She talks about personal experiences, one of probably...

her big appeals and why she has such an army of fans.

Yeah, and you have to remember at this point, you know, country music was not made for or by young people.

Yeah, sure, there was Shania, there was Leanne rhymes, but the vast majority of country music music was older guys and the women in it were singing about, you know, lost loves and kids and divorce, you know, not exactly the kind of bread and butter of a 13-year-old songwriter.

I still think of people like Kenny Rogers and Garth Brooks and people like that, who it was either kind of these old cowboy types or it was, as you say, people talking about the rent's due, the kids are this, I'm getting divorced.

Where have all the cowboys gone?

Yes, exactly.

Yeah, and she says, you know, Taylor Swift says, I felt there was no reason why country music shouldn't relate to someone my age, if someone my age was writing it.

So anyway, she's making money, and in fact, she bought in her sophomore year, that means when you're about 16, she gets enough money together to buy herself a Lexus convertible.

And the choice of that car is interesting.

Exactly.

If you remember the film Mean Girls, Regina George drives a Lexus.

And Taylor kind of describes the purchase as a revenge gift against the girls who were kind of ostracizing her at school.

And she says, it was like, you guys never invited me to anything.

You guys are obsessed with that car, but I've been working really hard every single day.

Instead of going to parties, I've been writing songs and, you know, getting paid.

And guess which one I'm going to buy?

The one that you girls idolize has.

There's something quite angular about that, isn't it?

It's a little bit of a FU, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah.

It's definitely pointed.

Let's put it that way.

Yeah, that's a good way of putting it.

So she moved to homeschooling after the 10th grade to fit school work around music.

She said she finished her education doing homeschool work on the floors of airport terminals.

And that airport terminals line should give you a bit of a heads up because, you know, the next few years are going to be pivotal for Taylor Swift.

So at 14, she walks away from RCA because the artist development deal falls apart.

The label shelved her and she said she genuinely felt like she was running out of time to make it.

They wanted her to sort of record other people's songs as well, which she didn't want to be just another sort of front person girl singer.

And it's interesting this assessment of her talent, right?

Because I think if you're a teenage girl and you're getting told you could be a big star, you'd just be like, yeah, sure, I'll record the song that someone else written for me.

Yeah, but it seems that she understood, and I think people around her understood, that her songwriting actually was one of her greatest talents.

And as we'll find out later on, it's also going to be a thing that makes her a huge amount of money.

Yeah, for sure.

So 15 years old at an industry showcase, she caught the attention of a guy called Scott Borchetta, a record executive who was setting up an independent record label called Big Machine Records.

She was one of Big Machine's first signings, and her father actually ended up putting money into the company.

He purchased around 3% share of Big Machine Records for a rumored $120,000.

And she said she wanted a record label that actually needed her.

She wanted, you know, to be pivotal to the success of the whole company.

And I guess it also helps that her dad now kind of owns shares in the company, right?

Exactly.

Before signing, though, she dumped her manager, Dan Dimtrow, and who would later sue her for breach of contract.

But Swift's lawyers hit back and said for him to claim that her success and her major contracts were procured by him is ludicrous.

So this case went on for years, but actually was kept rather quiet at that time.

There was an interesting point where Dan's lawyers released an email supposedly written by Taylor Swift's father to Scott Bochetta, where he said, enough with the Dimtrow.

You asked me to break both his legs, wrap him in chains and throw him into the lake.

I did.

Yeah, well, the judge threw out all of Dimtrow's claims except one for unjust enrichment and the case was settled out of court.

As the New Yorker puts it, it did provide glimpses into the adult negotiations inevitably at work behind a teenage success story.

Yeah, as we'll find out wherever Taylor goes, lawyers are never far behind.

In 2006, though, she released her eponymous debut album, and that spent 24 weeks at number one on the country music chart in the US, but didn't just do well in the country charts.

So it peaked at number five on the US billboard charts, and it was the longest charting album of the 2000s, like the whole decade.

Yeah, it passed 151-week chart life of her hero, Shania Twain's coming over.

So the crown is being handed over here.

And it made her rich.

Partly because of the fact that recording has two forms of copyright.

So just to break it down, there's a sound recording or the master recording, which is going to become very important.

And number two, the composition.

So as the songwriter, Taylor gets royalties for the copyright of the composition.

And that sets her apart from people like Britney Spears, Rihanna, Whitney Houston, for example.

They didn't write their own songs, so they're only getting one bit of that money, whereas she's getting both.

So by 2006, she is estimated to be worth around $4 million.

She is officially a millionaire at the age of 16.

Wow.

So let's chart how she goes from a million to a billion.

And this is the point at which she starts harnessing the emerging technologies to really push her brand and her music.

Now, if you cast your mind back to the halcyon years of 2006, there was a literal website called MySpace.

Yeah, I remember it well.

It was a big deal at the time.

It was bigger than Yahoo, bigger than Google.

It was the most visited website in the US.

And Taylor was using MySpace to communicate with her young fans.

She was putting music up before it was released.

She was getting them to help decide what was on the album.

She's beginning to forge what she's mastered to this day, which is kind of having like a digital nervous system.

She's got this kind of digital tentacles, which basically feedback information to her and she can project out to her fans.

Although, I think it's worth noting at this point, and I remember this point well because I was, for my sense, on MySpace a lot.

She wasn't the first artist to do this.

So, you know, people like Lily Allen, Arctic Monkeys, they were all posting on MySpace by 2005.

MySpace was what TikTok is to now, to music artists.

Yeah.

But what's special, I think, about Taylor Swift is there seems to be this deeply personal relationship where the fans feel very connected to her in a way that other people who use social media, you don't quite get that depth of connection.

No, and I think part of it is because when you start out so young in the music industry,

and you are in control of your music because you're writing the songs, people can kind of look at a Rihanna song and say, oh, I remember that because I was listening to that when I was in university.

But with Taylor, it's like you're seeing the world from her viewpoint.

And because she's been around for so long, that's a long time to be seeing the world through someone else's eyes.

So at the age of 18, she released her second album.

Again, it was sort of country pop.

It was called Fearless.

It spent 11 weeks at number one in the billboard.

That's the overall charts, not just country.

And it became the top-selling album in the US in 2009.

So it gave her tons of money and also mainstream access.

It got her her first headline tour.

She had over 1.1 million people attending over the 15 months it was going on.

Yeah.

And that is a feature of her career, these mammoth tours, which just seem to be getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

Yeah, I mean, that first headline tour alone grossed over $63 million.

And Fearless cleaned up at the awards.

She won the Grammy for Album of the Year, the youngest to ever win that award.

And memorably, she also won Best Female Video at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards for You Belong With Me, which controversially beat out Beyoncé's Single Ladies.

And Kanye West was not impressed.

No,

as she's accepting her award, he jumps up wearing shades and says, Yo, Taylor, I'm really happy for you.

I'm going to let you finish.

But Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time.

And to be fair, I think he's got a point.

I think Single Ladies was one of the greatest videos of all time.

Nevertheless, it was a very memorable hijacking moment.

Oh, yeah.

And it was actually a really big deal.

It got reported in every news outlet.

Obama was actually heard calling Kane a jackass in a leaked audio.

He was the president of the United States at the time.

And this event, this controversy, became one of the most talked about things on a platform which was quite new at that time, which was Twitter.

And it did wonders for her profile.

Oh, it did.

I think it actually created this kind of crucial turning point in Taylor's story.

You know, as one reporter for Vox put it, it set this narrative that Taylor Swift would always be a pop culture victim for better or for worse.

Yeah, and the president of Viacom, which is the company that owns MTV, said when he apologised to Scott Brochetta the next day, Scott responded, yesterday most of the country had no idea who Taylor Swift was.

Today, Oprah Winfrey sent her flowers and asked if she would talk to her on her show.

So even that moment of, I mean, it must have been a moment of extreme humiliation, you know, turned into a triumph.

Yeah.

So upward and onward, over the 2010s, she released four more wildly successful albums with Big Machine records speak now red 1989 and reputation they all debut at number one and her fifth album 1989 was her first true pop album so she basically left behind those country roots and it's also considered her most popular album it spent 472 weeks in the charts yeah and her 1989 tour grossed over a quarter of a billion dollars in 2015.

you remember the last one was 63 million it's now over 250 million and that album changed her career and kind of cemented her place place as a star who could make music on her own terms.

And she becomes a very powerful figure.

Before 1989's release, she wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, no less, condemning the devaluation of music from streaming's limited payouts.

Because at this point, the artists were getting less from the streamers than they would have done from record sales in the past.

And that's why they had to go on these big tours to make up the money.

And she said, music is art, and art is important and rare.

Important and rare things are valuable, and valuable things should be paid for.

for.

Good argument.

And she had a big clash with Spotify.

She said she only wanted paid subscribers to be able to access her music.

Spotify turned her down.

So she removed her entire catalogue from Spotify, including 1989.

So she's prepared to go toe-to-toe with some powerful players.

Yeah, it's really ballsy when you think of it that way.

She also wrote on Tumblr.

She criticized Apple Music for not paying artists during a free three-month trial.

The following day, Apple changed its policy.

Taylor Power, right there.

Swift and Omics, et cetera.

And 1989 was made available on Apple Music.

It's interesting how she plays off the streamers against each other, right?

Yeah, but also she still, even though she's winning all of this, she always comes out as the wronged party somehow, as the victim in this, and she turns that to advantage.

And it's interesting because when you kind of portray yourself in that way, when you inevitably triumph, as Taylor does all the time, you then kind of enjoy the clout of being the wronged party who is now enjoying their day in the sun.

So when three years later in 2017, she announced that the entire catalogue was available again on Spotify to thank her fans, it also makes headlines.

Yeah, and that's why some people think that there's quite a lot of choreography to her battles and her relationships.

It never wastes a chance for a good bit of promotion.

Her life is her career, and her career is her life.

I think that's a nice way of putting it.

Yeah, well, let's talk about some of her famous boyfriends because she's had a few.

So, her personal life regularly makes the headlines.

She dates a lot of famous guys, and this began in 2008.

She dated Joe Jonas of the Jonas Brothers, another massive pop act for a few months.

And when she was promoting Fearless on the Ellen DeGenere show, she said that Forever and Always was written about their breakup.

Yeah, and in 2009, she briefly dated Twilight's Taylor Lautner and the singer and the blues guitar player John Mayer.

Both of those inspired songs.

In the 2010s, she dated Jake Gyllenhaal, Harry Styles, Calvin Harris.

What a role call that is.

All have featured in her music.

In 2016, she was papped kissing Tom Hiddleston, the actor.

So, this, just like we had Bran Jalina, this was Hiddle Swift for a while.

So, there were photo ops.

He was even spotted wearing an iHeart TS tank top.

Yeah, speculation though that this was a publicity stunt.

And I remember the period of her dating celebrity guys really, really well.

And I think towards the end, especially around the Tom Hiddleston relationship, people started getting quite tired of the overexposure and they got really suspicious, for better or worse right because tom hiddleston's always denied it was fake however shortly afterwards she began her longest relationship to date even though it is now over it lasted for six years and it was with a not quite famous person an actor joe alwyn the joe alwyn relationship was really kept on the down low like compared to you know tank top saying i love taylor swift maybe there's a difference between the ones which you miraculously get papped kissing tom hiddleston but this joe alwyn one was quite provided maybe that was a real one, and the other ones were slightly confected.

One person she didn't have a romantic relationship was with Kanye West.

He's back in the frame here because this feud returns because he debuted his track Famous, which included lyrics, I feel like me and Taylor Might Still Have Sex.

Why I Made That Bitch Famous?

Right.

Charming.

Kanye's made a few appearances in this podcast, surprisingly, even though he's not a billionaire himself.

Yeah.

And he actually released a video with Taylor Swift's face on a naked woman in in bed with a naked Kanye and Kim.

But he maintains, didn't he, that he'd got her permission and had a long phone call about this in which she approved, specifically approved that lyric.

Yeah, so this is interesting.

Kim Kardashian, who was at the time married to Kanye, told GQ that Taylor totally approved that as in the lyric.

She totally knew that that was coming out.

She wanted to all of a sudden act like she didn't.

And Kim followed that up with releasing a video of the phone call itself and you can hear Kanye telling Taylor about the line, I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex, to which Taylor responds, it's like a compliment.

And if people asked me about it, I think it would be great for me to be like, he called me and told me before it came out, jokes on you guys, we're fine.

So after Kim released the video of this phone call, hashtag KimExposed Taylor Party started trending on Twitter.

You know, the backlash started brewing against her.

People started thinking, oh, is Taylor manufacturing stuff?

Is she just lying?

Taylor says the video is very selectively edited.

And she asked the question, Where's the video of Kanye telling me he was going to call me that bitch in his song, It Doesn't Exist Because It Never Happened?

And this was not the only guy that she was fighting on the public's arena.

So in 2013, the radio DJ David Miller was sacked after she complained that he'd groped her at a meet-and-greet.

Yeah, he sued her for $3 million in damages, claiming he'd been falsely accused, that she'd ruined his career.

But his case was dismissed.

And in fact, she then counter-sued, claiming he'd sexually assaulted her.

She took the stand in court in 2017, so around the same time as this Hokaniah Kimfield, and said, you're supposed to be really polite to everyone.

Something snapped, I think.

And the jury ruled in her favour, and she asked him to pay $1 to her in symbolic damages.

It's the point of principle that she wants to prove.

We should say this is two months before the Me Too movement really got going.

So this was a precursor to some of that.

And these kind of public battles, they kind of set the scene for what is now the big drama that goes on to kind of completely redefine her public image in the 2020s.

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So we come to 2018.

Her record deal with Big Machine expires.

She's been with them since she was 15.

She moves to a new record label, Republic Records, and as part of the new deal with Republic Records, she's going to own all her masters going forward.

But her old masters are still under the ownership of Big Machine.

And then...

Pivotally, in 2019, Big Machine gets bought by a music executive called Scooter Braun.

He's 38 years old.

He's the guy who discovered Justin Bieber on YouTube.

He also was managing Ariana Grande, Demio Lovato, and Kaniya West for a couple of years during the whole famous saga.

So Scooter Braun now effectively owns the copyright to her six album Master Catalogue, which even then was valued at $140 million.

So just to remind you, Taylor Swift still gets the songwriter royalties.

But now Scooter has the ability to decide that if these songs are used in ads or films, he will be the one who gets paid the master royalty.

Yes, and it's just not that uncommon.

Quite a lot of artists, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, even Bob Dylan, actually sell the copyright to their recordings and they get paid now.

And the people who buy it will get the royalties many, many years into the future.

So he essentially owns her back catalogue.

But when the sale was announced, Taylor posted on Tumblr and said that this was her worst case scenario.

All I could think about, she says, was the incessant manipulative bullying I've I've received at its hands for years.

You know, from Taylor's perspective, Scooter Braun was managing Kanye West during the time of the whole famous, you know, track and video fallout.

So essentially, the way she sees it is that he wanted to control a woman who didn't want to be associated with them through the use and ownership of her master records.

Got it.

Okay.

Justin Bieber comes to Scooter's defense, questioning Taylor's reason for the post.

What were you trying to accomplish by posting that blog?

It seems to me like it was to get sympathy.

You also knew that in posting, your fans would go and bully Scooter.

And she also revealed why she changed labels from Big Machine.

She said, for years I pleaded for a chance to own my work.

Instead, I was given an opportunity to sign back up to Big Machine Records and earn one album of my own back at a time for every new one I turned in.

I walked away because I knew once I signed that contract, Scott Borchetta would sell the label, thereby selling me and my future.

I had to make the excruciating choice to leave behind my past, but as we'll find, she goes back to reclaim it.

So Scott Bochetta has always disputed this.

You know, he's posted screenshots of negotiation documents, a Swiss team that would give her control of her own masters upon signing.

And he also claims that Taylor's father was informed because he's of course the shareholder.

All of this makes the headlines.

And Taylor ended her long post with Lover will be out August the 23rd.

So once again, when she's in the public eye, she'll just drop a little promo in.

Keep a look out for this.

It's very canny.

I feel like most people's natural reaction to something terrible happening to them is to clam up and be silent.

And Taylor just doesn't do that.

No.

And that album, Lover, and all 18 songs from it, charted on the US Billboard singles chart in the same week.

That sets another record for the most simultaneous entries by a woman, something which is only really possible, I suppose, in the age of streaming.

So we come to the end of 2019.

She's 30 years old.

She's worth around $360 million.

And then the pandemic hits and she has to cancel The Lover Tour.

Yeah, but she releases two quarantine albums, if you like, in 2020, Folklore and Evermore.

And people think that this sort of suited the mood of the time.

Do you remember it?

I listened a lot to folklore in the pandemic.

She worked with, you know, really credible indie artists like The National and Bonneva.

And I think it really kind of created a kind of national shift in the way people viewed Taylor.

So I talked a bit about how, you you know, her overexposure, her dating history, all of this has kind of made her vulnerable to a lot of critical.

There was a big backlash.

I mean, if you look at the media from the time people were publishing articles with headlines like how Taylor Swift played the victim for a decade and made it an entire career, when did you realize Taylor Swift was lying to you?

You know, she was actually kind of in danger of becoming overplayed.

You know, and there was a point where she could have really lost that momentum.

So that change in tone for folklore actually was pretty pretty well judged and in fact brought her quite a bit of critical acclaim.

And she was a pop sensation for sure, but there was a sort of maturity and a critical acclaim for this one.

Yeah and also importantly what she's always said about the albums is that they're fictional so they're not based on her real life.

It's kind of stuff she made up during the pandemic.

So she's kind of distancing herself from the old tailor who used to let her public life fuel her songwriting and make people obsess over is a song about Kanye, is a song about Harry Styles.

She's kind of left it behind with these two albums.

So she's kind of pivoted a little way here, but still moving on like a commercial joggernaut.

Sort of Taylor Swift is sort of too big to fail.

And at this point, she does something truly audacious.

She decides to re-record her first six albums, the ones that are owned by Scooter Braun.

That is quite a move.

I'd never come across that because I remember that story coming out.

I thought, I wonder if anyone else has ever done that.

Because there have been big bust-ups between artists and their labels before.

You remember what happened with Prince, of course.

George Michael had a bad fight with his record label.

This is a master stroke.

It's like well master literally using the word if I can't own the masters to my own road I'll go back and re-record them identically so that I do own them and they're called Taylor's versions aren't they?

Yes they are and it's become kind of a thing to not listen to the big machine versions of the albums.

So if you're a Swifty

Taylor's version.

You no longer listen to versions that are now owned by Scooter.

And that's asking quite a lot of your fans, is is asking them to go out and buy again something they've already paid for.

So that's some loyalty they're showing there.

It's interesting because when I first heard about her re-recording the albums, I kind of thought to myself, oh, what's the point, right?

You know, you've already done this.

Surely it's kind of artistically not very creative or fulfilling for you.

But of course, it gets a lot of money in.

Yeah.

So she begins releasing these re-recorded albums in 2021 and every single one of them makes number one all over again.

Yeah, she's only on number four out of six.

So let's bring it up to date now.

In March of last year, this massive carousel which careers around the world begins, the era's tour.

And what is that again?

What does it consist of?

It's a retrospective.

So she's singing songs from 10 studio albums.

The set list is a mammoth, 44 songs long, and it lasts for three and a half hours.

I mean, she's got some stamina to do that, hasn't she?

Oh, yeah.

She's a high-energy performer.

Yeah.

And doing that for three and a half hours.

This is 150 stadium shows and they keep adding new ones still rumbling on around the world this is still going on as we speak and it's sold out in record time so if you try to get your hands on a Taylor Swift Eras ticket you will know they were kind of averaging around $250

but many paid far more on the resale market and it's already the highest grossing tour of all time yeah I remember these big tours that remember when Pink Floyd used to have the highest grossing tour then it was U2 now she has definitely taken the credits the first tour ever to surpass a billion dollars in revenue.

And as you've pointed out, it's created this financial phenomenon, the Taylor Swift effect or Swiftonomics.

Yeah, when the Taylor Swift show rolls into town, it makes huge revenue for each city.

The 53 US shows alone added an estimated $4.3 billion to America's GDP, gross GDP.

Looking for another opportunity, she also funded and released the ERA's tour concert movie.

So if you couldn't get to the show itself, you can go and watch the movie.

And the movie did incredibly well as well.

Yeah, it made $100 million in global pre-sales alone and became the 10th highest grossing film of 2023 in the States.

I mean, that is just crazy that you could just, oh, by the way, let's make another 100 million by releasing a video of the tour.

Astonishing.

So, I mean, it really is the kind of climax of what live music can do and how much money it can make in a post-streaming world.

It's a far cry, this business model, from the old one where, you know, the Rolling Rolling Stones or the Beatles would write an album, go into the studio, record it, and then go and sit at home for the next two years and let the money roll in.

You've got to work hard for your money, but if you do it right, like Taylor Swift is doing, it can be incredibly lucrative because you're not making the same kind of money on album sales that you used to.

So, you know, in my day, I'd buy a CD, it cost me £14.99.

You've sold tens of millions of these albums.

That's a lot of money.

With streaming, you get fractions of a cent for every streaming thing.

And what's interesting about this is that when I was a kid and I went in and I bought my $14.99 album from Darrell Smith's or Tao Records, my financial relationship with that band is now over effectively until they release another album.

That's it, I'm done.

Was with streaming and with social media, the relationship, you have to keep it alive all the time.

And I knew somebody who was in a pop band and they said, actually, you've got to keep feeding the beast.

You have to keep feeding the social thing.

You have to keep that relationship up.

They want to know what you're doing.

They want to know what your car you drive, what clothes you're wearing.

That relationship has to be fostered and nurtured and fed incessantly.

And Taylor's very good at that.

You know, even before the era's tour, she was doing things like sending presents to fans, unexpectedly, turning up at some random person's wedding as a kind of like surprise.

You know, she's...

If you were the bride at this wedding,

would you be slightly pissed off that Taylor Swift comes and sat down on a side?

It depends on how much of a Swifty I am.

And it also kind of probably depends on the partner and what they think of Taylor Swift.

So, I mean, the money is rolling in, she's raking it in.

In October of 2023, Bloomberg and Forbes declared Taylor Swift was a billionaire with $1.1 billion due to that era's tour and the movie, plus the release of Taylor's version album of those back albums.

So, they estimate she's gotten 500 million from music royalties and touring, 125 million from real estate.

She has six homes in a $10 million private plane, and $500 million based on the rising value of her music catalogue.

And actually she's the only one of four musicians to have achieved billionaire status and we've done some of them on the show but they they made their big money outside of the of music.

Jay-Z with his booze brands, Rihanna with Fenty Beauty, Jimmy Buffett has his Margaritaville, which is a chain of resorts based on his famous song.

She is the first billionaire from the music alone.

I mean, it's kind of inspirational when you think about it because when you're a musician, you just want to make music, right?

Kind of probably don't really want to get into other brands.

You don't want to own a random resort chain.

But Taylor's the one who made it all through music.

Not only is she a newly minted billionaire, she's now got a new relationship with the NFL, American football player, Travis Kelsey.

So again, the internet was buzzing with rumors about whether the relationship with us was a PR stunt, but it turns out that whether or not it is or isn't, the Taylor effect works for Travis.

So there's been a 400% increase in his jersey sales.

He's gained millions of followers and even viewing figures for the NFL have improved.

And this year she's going to make even more money as she tours Asia, Australia and Europe.

It's estimated the tour will net her $4 billion in total.

So she may very well be quadrupling her wealth in the next few years.

Yeah.

Are we at peak, Taylor Swift?

We've got to be pretty close, haven't we?

There was a point probably when, you know, she was in danger of being overexposed and people were like, we've reached peak Taylor Swift.

Nobody wants to hear about her and Tom Hiddison.

Who cares?

Blah, blah, blah.

And then, lo and behold, we reached a new level of Taylor Swift obsession.

I know.

So I think, you know, the bar is pretty high.

I mean, you've got to think in many ways the only way is down from here because she is already the most famous person in the world.

Her tours are the highest-grossing tours of all time.

The mind boggles as to how much bigger this phenomenon could get.

I think it will depend on where she goes as a songwriter because she is a great songwriter.

You know, if you listen to more stripped-back albums like folklore, she knows her way around a really good song.

And when she kind of takes it all the way back to just that artistry, her songs really, really stand up for the test of time.

So I think it depends if she grows as an artist.

If she goes back to the old Taylor Swift of, you know, writing wrongs through music and, you know, getting in big public spat.

Yeah, I don't think it's going to go well.

But if she evolves as an artist, yeah, I think the sky's the limit.

Have I already said this?

I think that Shake It Off is one of the best pop songs ever written.

No, you haven't, but that's good to get on record.

Okay.

It's irresistible.

So Taylor Swift, good, bad, or just another billionaire?

Let's start with the first category.

So we rank these from one to ten.

How does she score on wealth?

Well, she's the richest musician who's made their riches through the music ever.

But in terms of the billionaires we've covered, she's at the lower end of the wealth category.

She's nowhere near a kind of Elon Musk.

But Bloomberg

said, taken together, Swift Inc., as they describe her, is essentially a multinational conglomerate with the world's most devoted customer base.

It's the most charismatic CEO and significant economic power.

I'm going to give her a six for wealth.

Ooh.

See, I kind of feel like apart from the private jets, which I want to talk about later on, she doesn't actually wear her wealth that ostentatiously.

No.

Certainly not in the same way, you know, Elon Musk would, for instance.

She's not riding rockets to the the moon.

Yeah, and she still has got that kind of girl next door kind of thing.

I understand your pain.

You and I can be friends.

You know, there's nothing,

she's not trying to be aloof or exclusive.

No, so actually, I would give her a four out of 10 for this.

Like, she's got a long way to go if she wants to hit the top 100 billionaires.

Okay.

Fair enough.

I'm going to revise mine down to five.

So you're a four.

You've convinced me.

I'm a five.

Now let's talk about rags to riches.

This is how far they've come.

And this one, I don't think she scores that highly either because her dad was a stockbroker, came from a long line of bank presidents, and they had a pretty nice life.

Yeah, and I feel like the whole kind of folksy, Miss Americana persona.

If she hadn't moved to Nashville, she probably couldn't play that card, really.

No.

You know, being a folksy girl from Pennsylvania, who's the daughter of a stockbroker, doesn't quite have the same ring.

No, it's not the Dolly Parton story, is it?

That's for sure.

No.

Rags to Rich is two.

Maybe not riches, but death for fame.

Rags to fame.

She's probably the most famous person in the world.

I'm going to slightly revise yours up to a three for me.

Okay.

Villainy.

Now, this is an interesting one.

This is like, you know, have they done people over?

They're on their way to success.

Have they played pretty fast and loose morally with how they've got there?

And she's had plenty of public feuds, that's for sure.

Yeah, definitely.

So obviously, Kane West, Scooter Braun, came Kardashian by extension, by way of...

Katy Perry, Bad Blood, that was about Katy Perry, wasn't it?

Yeah.

Well,

interestingly, there's been a lot of subtle comments made, but nobody's ever come out and said, besides Kanye, I'm in a feud with Taylor Swift.

But what she does is she always looks like the kind of wronged party who triumphs over adversity in the end, and rightly so.

She manages to come out on top.

I wonder if this is, and you know, maybe this is a generous interpretation, if this is just how women need to portray themselves in order to win.

Like, maybe there's a Taylor who is just like, yeah, I'm going to knife people and I'm going to enjoy doing it because that's what the guys do.

And that's what a lot of Fortune 500 billionaires probably do all the time because that's what you need to win.

But if you're a woman and your persona is, you know, this folksy Miss Americana hero, you probably can't get away with doing that.

So you probably have to make yourself out to be a victim.

Yeah.

And also, these feuds are very much the oxygen of her PR machine, aren't they?

They keep it kind of on the road.

People are endlessly speculating who's she having a fight with now.

There is a commercial value to these spats.

Yeah.

And also, you know, the whole relationship stuff.

You know, she, people do speculate all the time about Easter eggs left in her lyrics and her album art.

You know, is this about him?

Is this about, you know, this guy in particular?

So she's very canny about playing her fan base in that way.

I think one thing we can definitely sort of have a question mark about is

that she's got, with this era's tour, she's got one hell of a carb footprint.

Yes, yeah, she does.

And interestingly, this relationship with Travis Kelsey has come under a lot of scrutiny because they are constantly using private jets to fly around to see each other.

Two private jets.

She's made 170 journeys in six months.

And someone's done the calculations.

That's 8,000 tons in carbon emissions.

And that makes her 637 times bigger carbon footprint than the average person in the US.

Yeah, she's estimated to have the largest carbon footprint of any celebrity.

You can't go on world tours without, you know, without doing this kind of stuff, but there we go.

Villainy, I don't know.

I feel that some of the villainy is is slightly confected because it gives the oxygen of social media and people are obsessed by it and it serves a purpose.

She doesn't come across to me as like a sort of, you know, devious person.

So I don't know.

This is a hazardous category with an army of Swifties out there.

I'm going to let you go first.

Okay, so I actually think that the whole kind of

tailor manufactures all of this stuff, you know, she's just playing everyone for fools.

I mean, look, at the time she was dating tons of guys.

She was in her 20s and 30s.

Homst Among Us hasn't been there.

If I was a multi-million dollar celebrity artist, I would 100% be writing songs about all these guys.

It's interesting that when it came to a more serious relationship with Joe Alwyn, that was kind of kept off the books significantly more.

Can you really blame a songwriter for using her real life for material?

No.

Yeah, exactly.

So for me, she doesn't score very highly for that.

But the private jet stuff, come on, Taylor, at least plant a few rainforests.

I know you could do it.

So, for the private jet stuff alone, the carbon stuff alone, I'd give her a four out of ten.

Four out of ten.

I'm happy there as well.

I don't want to be an outlier from you in any way.

Just in case we're going down, we're going down together.

Okay, well, here's a category where maybe Taylor can redeem herself.

Philanthropy.

Yeah, she's related to a range of charities with resonance to her particularly.

She gave a million dollars to a tornado recovery fund in Nashville, a million dollars to flood relief in Louisiana and 50,000 to New York City public schools.

50,000 seems like a pretty low number.

She also has donated to People's GoFundMe.

She donated 13K in 2020 to a mother who was struggling to pay the bills during the pandemic.

She donated 50K in 2021 to a family whose father died of COVID-19.

And she looks after her own.

She reportedly gave every member of her era's tour crew bonuses totaling over $55 million, including $100,000 each to the truckers.

I have a good story about this.

I don't know if you can put it in because it's definitely not verified.

So a friend of a friend worked on the ERAS tour.

And at the time they were giving out these big bonuses, he got called in to a room with Taylor and the rest of the big bosses.

And he got given a check.

And he looked down and he saw $5,000.

And he was like, oh, cheers, thanks very much.

And everyone in the room started looking at each other like, okay, what's okay?

And he walked out like whistling a tune, being like, five grand, great, can go on a nice holiday.

And the corridor was full of people weeping, calling families, being like, we can finally afford the deposit on the house.

And he looked at his check again and realized he'd missed out the zeros and he'd been given 50K.

50,000.

Yeah.

Wow.

That is a good story.

So philanthropy, I don't know, million dollars here, a million dollars there, and very good to her own people on the tour.

I'd still think it's only a five.

Yeah, I'd put it straight down the line, five out of ten.

To be fair, she probably hasn't even started really thinking about it, right?

Yeah.

She's not even really in the Oprah Winfrey level of her fame yet, where you're thinking about foundations and things.

Correct.

I'm sure that'll come, though.

We've got plenty of time to be more generous, Taylor, if you're listening.

Power.

I think, I mean, we've already discussed this, that she can actually change the economic level of activity when her tour rolls into town.

The Federal Reserve was saying she's boosted GDP in the US.

That's quite an effect.

An economist actually told the BBC: cities are constantly strapped for cash.

So the impact of the Taylor Swift economy is that cities will have the revenue to invest in public infrastructure, transit, safety, and planning.

So if the pothole in your road gets fixed, maybe you can thank Taylor Swift.

Amazing.

So there's economic power, there's also political power.

She's had quite an impact on that, particularly on getting people to register to vote.

Yeah, so in 2018, 160,000 people registered to vote vote 48 hours after she weighed in on American politics.

She was previously pretty kind of stump on any kind of politics.

She actually declared her support for the Democratic candidate in the midterm election in her home state of Tennessee and spurred a ton of people to vote.

Interesting, because country music and the heartlands of country music are generally considered to be more Republican-leaning, so she's a bit of an odd fit there.

Yeah, she's a bit of an outlier, which I think makes her political influence even more important because, you know, she's basically one in a very very empty field of democrat leaning country music singers in fact um donald trump was forced to comment on taylor swift he said i think i i like her music about 25 less now very specific unfortunately however taylor's candidate lost but you know now she is on record as being a democrat supporter so if you've got presidents commenting on her you've got barack obama calling kenny a jackass for when he tried to interrupt her you've got people registering to vote for the first time.

She's a powerful person.

I mean, if she goes out and gets behind a cause or a subject, then she can move the needle on it.

I'm going to give her an eight for power.

I would give her a nine, but part of that is based on my idea that she could probably do a lot more.

You know, like she's been quite quiet about politics, like, you know, in the last few years.

I expect for this year, she's probably going to start becoming more vocal and then we'll rule.

Because we're in an election year in the U.S.

Exactly.

And election year, you know, in tons of countries.

So I think we're going to really see the extent of that power play out this year.

But that is a potential banana skin, isn't it?

I mean, when people get involved in politics, people get fed up with that.

It's like, you know, stick to your tours and all that kind of stuff.

When people get actively involved in politics, it's a commercially dangerous move because you're possibly going to alienate 50% of your fans.

It is.

And actually, there's a really interesting part in the documentary that she made, Miss Americana, where she has almost a screaming argument with her management team about her support for the Democrats and she really does not like Trump at all she's arguing with them about coming out politically as a Democrat and it's really interesting because yeah all those arguments come up but she's very firm about the fact that she has to say something so I expect 2024 we're going to see her become a bit more vocal again and then we've got legacy kind of too soon to write this one yet isn't it i think when it comes to legacy she's going to not just have a cultural legacy but also a legacy that will be really important for the music industry.

Because interestingly, when the big machine records deal expired in 2018, she signed this new big multi-album deal with Republic Records, which is part of Universal.

And she made it a condition of that contract that if Universal sold its Spotify shares, the label would distribute money from that sale to all the artists it represents, non-recoupable, which basically means that it won't count against their advances.

And this was a really big deal to her.

Apparently, it meant more to her than any other bit of the deal.

So she was trying to make sure that other artists got more revenue than was normally the case.

Exactly and I think that if Taylor is going to get more involved in the whole you know argument that artists should own more of their recordings, they should make money from their art, I think she's going to have a really huge impact on the music industry for years to come, for decades.

And also just the economic model she's got of the mega tour, the movie of the mega tour, all that kind of stuff that she's set a kind of template for how the music business can, should, and if you're famous enough, can work for you, while at the same time giving the artists a bigger slice of the pie.

Yeah, I think if you're an emerging artist and you want to be the next Taylor Swift, you're going to look at the business model and the way she's negotiated all those master recordings and think to yourself, okay, I don't need to sign away my life here.

I can do a Taylor.

And I think that's going to be really influential.

I think that's going to be a big part of her legacy.

That's really, really interesting you say that.

I agree with you.

I would say, yeah, for that, she scores pretty highly.

I'm going to give her an eight for legacy.

I would give her an eight for legacy too.

And, you know, she's got two more points to win in the next 40 odd years of her career.

I think she could do it.

She can make it to 10.

Maybe we should come back and revisit this one in 10 years' time and see what's happened there.

So we have to judge her, Zing.

This is the dangerous part of the recording.

Is Taylor Swift good, bad, or just another billionaire?

Oh, you know what?

I will hold my hands up and say I'm not a Swifty.

I don't know much of her early records, but for

the sheer amount of comfort that folklore gave to me during the pandemic, and also the fact that I think she's really pioneered a new way of being an artist and a brand, which I think is especially persuasive and influential for young women.

I think she's got to be good.

Yeah.

Who are you kidding?

There's an army of Swifty's out there.

Of course she's good.

No, I think you're right.

She's basically really left her stamp on the music industry.

She's got legions of adoring fans.

She's a fantastic songwriter.

Have I mentioned this already?

That Shake It Off is the greatest pop song ever.

I didn't mention it again.

So for all those reasons, who are we kidding?

Taylor Swift is good.

All she needs to do is stop using the private jet so much.

So there we go.

That was Taylor Swift, one of our good billionaires.

We'll be back in a couple of weeks, revisiting another of our favourite episodes.

And don't forget that we'll be back on March the 17th with a brand new season.

Yeah, we've got some super famous billionaires lined up for that.

But if you can't wait that long, there are lots of great episodes available to listen right now, including ones on a couple more incredibly rich musicians, Rihanna and Jay-Z.

Thanks for listening to Good Bad Billionaire.

This podcast is produced by Hannah Hufford and Mark Ward.

James Cook is our editor and it's a BBC audio production.

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