Can someone explain to me what makes Taylor Swift so popular?
I don't get it. Her music is sometimes catchy but otherwise unremarkable, from the songs I've heard. How does she break all these records and accumulate so much fame and wealth?
She's pretty, but a lot of singer songwriters are, especially those with makeup and costume people, a support staff.
Is there something else to her that people like?
I'm confused about what makes her so apparently unique or phenomenal.
Update: there are so many things that make swift unique or phenomenal.
I've received tons of great answers from people that have helped me understand, like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle, many factors that makes swift different and consequently more successful than her peers.
Clever lyrics, top-tier production, sharing autobiographical and emotional points in her life very directly, apparent honesty with few or no public blemishes, creating a community of fans through Easter eggs and house parties and unconventional, but always personal methods, an early start supported by wealthy parents, she keeps winning against abusers, and her music itself is popular and fun.
Those are just a few of the puzzle pieces contributed here, and a dive into this post is a pretty good explanation of many of the factors that must be contributing to her phenomenal success and recognition, that set her apart from other pop stars, even pop stars who were phenoms in their own right.
This is a very educational post, thank you to everyone who has contributed.
I wanted to chime in, since I'm in the unique situation of not being a "Swiftie" but still having an above-average knowledge of Taylor Swift due to being married to a Swiftie.
For starters, her songs are very relatable for women. Especially in women around her age, she was routinely writing songs that spoke to the emotions during each periods of their lives. My wife, for example, was in middle/high school when Taylor was releasing her romantic country songs, and met me right around when Taylor released Lover. This is all because Taylor is extremely autobiographical with her lyrics and was writing about what she was experiencing at the time. She wrote lovesongs in Speak Now because she was in high school and early college when she produced the album. She wrote Lover because she had met a man who, at the time, she perceived to be a man she could spend the rest of her life with. Since Red, very few of her songs are about hypothetical situations. Almost all of them are about her real experiences as a person and as a woman, with the exception of folklore and Evermore, and that speaks to women in a very strong way. Her lyrics and reasons behinds songs are deep, much deeper than most give her credit for.
Additionally, she is extremely good at marketing. Many of her songs and albums have Easter eggs in them that only true fans will be able to find. She also drops a lot of cryptic hints, which her fans love to dissect and interpret to try and predict major releases or announcements. It's just good fun for them, and it increases the hype significantly. Also, her concerts are not just live music, they're a whole show. The Eras concert is 3 hours long, and she is singing and running the entire time. She rarely lip-syncs - I say rarely because I've heard claims that she does but I have never seen it - and gives it her all every single concert. Her band and many of her dancers and support staff have been with her for a decade or more now, and they have continued to routinely put on shows to the best of their abilities without fail.
Finally, she is, most Swifties believe, a genuinely good person. The worst thing I've ever heard of her doing is loaning her private jet out to her friends and families which caused her to break the news because her jet was causing a lot of emissions. Beyond that, she seems to be a grounded woman who genuinely loves her fans and the people around her.
If you take nothing else away from this post, this is the most important fact: She is relatable to women. She sings about her lived experiences, many of which are relatable to her fans.
Think of a dish made by a world class chef, that food is probably exquisitely crafted using unique and fresh ingredients. There probably aren't that many people out there who truly appreciate it, and probably a lot who just think it's weird.
Now think of pizza. It's relatively cheap and broadly appealing. It wouldn't be put in the same class as the food prepared by the chef, but a lot more of it gets consumed.
Taylor Swift is talented, pretty, affable, has a superior work ethic, and makes music that's catchy and easily digestible. Like pizza, her music appeals to the broadest group of people.
-Very skilled songwriter. I don't necessarily like all her stuff but I legitimately think she's the best songwriter (meaning, composing music and writing lyrics) of her generation. Probably since Bruce Springsteen or Billy Joel.
-Very attractive and a good performer
-Well connected in the music industry let her get an early start/inside track
-obsessed with being popular. I don't mean that in a negative way, but her primary objective with her music is to please as many people as possible. I think the documentary "Miss Americana" on Netflix explains that very well-at one point she straight up says "I just want people to like me" or something like that. That means her music/career has always focused on mass appeal as opposed to making more... limited-appeal music like most artists do at some point in their career
-she's kept a remarkably clean image even through being famous for close to two decades. It's very telling that the worst thing her haters can say about her is "but her plane uses a lot of carbon!" This means parents let kids listen to her, brands love her as a sponsor, nobody boycotts her, etc.
-one last thing, I think people love her songs because they feel like they're true. Her songs have a very intimate, almost confessional quality that a lot of artists strive for buy often comes off as fake.
I used to dislike Taylor Swift along with all other contemporary pop stars. Maybe even a little bit more, because she had the audacity to call herself Country: Spitting in the face of personal heroes like Kristofferson, Nelson, and Cash.
Then I stopped being an edgy teenager, Swift released Shake it Off, and I had to recognize it was a fun song to dance to. In an ironic kind of way of course, but nevertheless.
And then, in 2015, Ryan Adams released his cover album of Swift's 1989, playing every single song on the album in a folksy way. I dug it. And with it, I had to appreciate that Taylor Swift is one hell of a songwriter: I loved the songs, I just don't love the sound of pop music all that much. That's personal taste, not everything I dislike is bad.
Fast forward to 2020, and Taylor Swift dabbles with music I can actually enjoy listening to with her album folklore. Pretty cool. I actually got my expectations up for her next album, evermore, low-key hoping that it would be musically inspired by the Battle of Evermore. Sadly I was wrong, but again, it's a matter of personal preferences.
What matters more is the fact that she's reinventing herself from album to album - she's successful in one formula, and she just ditches it and moves on to something different. And every time she does it, she seems to be even more successful than the last time. Her growth as an artist is astonishing.
Finally, she's just cool. Fuck the labels - she'll just casually re-records her entire discography in order to take back control of her songs. She's caught up in all kinds of stupid celebrity drama, but it tends to be the rest of the industry falling over like toddlers trying to drag her into shit for PR while she acts like the only adult in the room. She also scores points for casually hanging out with Billy Bragg and encouraging people to vote and shit.
The reason is that her dad is quite rich and was a stock broker.
He invested heavily in the label that had his daughter under contract, being able to dictate what the label was focusing on and on top he has thrown another Million on her, to start the journey.
So to sum it up a huge tone of money, contacts and knowledge about how to run a business by her father.
The music industry has been a racket for nearly 100 years. Music doesn't get popular because people like it, it gets popular because it's promoted. Way back when, promoters would pay radio stations to play their music to encourage sales. The methods are slightly different now, but it's still the same kind of old boy's club telling people what they like.
Taylor Swift understood the industry she was getting into, and was very adept at exploiting it.
I'm not a huge fan or anything, but I think she's a really talented musician and really good at managing her fame. She keeps a strong relationship with her fans, her music spans numerous genres, and her father is a wealth manager.
Watching her Tiny Desk concert helped me get more into her music so I could enjoy it with my daughter.
Don't really see her as being massively more popular than people like Michael Jackson or Madonna at their peak. She's like 18 years into her career at this point, like a snowball accumulating more and more fans.
Of course it helps that she had rich parents to be able to grease the wheels in the early stages of her career.
The music is alright. There's a decent amount of it, and it's fairly varied. It's called pop for a reason.
You are asking an infinitely difficult question of why she is so incredibly popular, I don't think I can tell you why she's more popular than, say, Beyoncé. Except maybe that she is more consistent. That said, I'll give you my perspective on why I like Taylor Swift.
I'm a dude and my music taste is pretty diverse but I mostly grew up listening to metal and punk. That said, when I left my ex (for the second time). It felt really good to listen to We are never ever getting back together on repeat. Most breakups I've had, had songs that have helped me through and leaving a toxic relationship... It just felt really good to repeatedly sing those words over and over.
I don't know if it's actually true but I'm a guitarist and I've heard the phrase "Taylor Swift is the Beatles of the 21st century" meaning her music releases currently have the largest impact on guitar sales and popularity. If for nothing else, I respect her a lot for performing live with a guitar. She doesn't do anything crazy but you don't have to have crazy guitar skills to make good music. I personally enjoy learning her songs every now and then because a) they are relatively straightforward to learn but still encompass nice playful elements, b) I am mostly interested in becoming a better singer nowadays and her songs are definitely challenging for me to sing.
Both folklore and evermore are really nice albums imo. Very nice and tasteful music. Last year I had a phase where I was having trouble finding music. I was sick of extreme metal, I was sick of hardcore techno, and I listened to so much leftist folk and folk punk that I grew sick of it. All the music I listened to was always fast, intense and challenging. I just wanted nice songs that I can sing along to with real instrumentation. I realised I don't mind pop music but I like real instruments because they feel more real to me (fwiw lol, please don't take this as hatred for electronics, I also love techno as stated above). Well folklore and evermore offer just that for me. Nice songs with real instruments and beautiful instrumentation. I prefer folklore for being darker but evermore uses more guitar which I also like.
My fav songs out of the 2 albums:
Folklore
cardigan
mirrorball
this is me trying
invisible string
Evermore
willow
champagne problems
'tis the damn season
I still want to express that I don't always like her lyric writing. She uses brand names a bunch and I also feel like there are often references to American things which I just don't know about.
Also, while I like folklore and evermore, I find them borderline impossible to listen to all the way through. All the songs basically strike the same mood, it's nice relaxing music, but there's not a big emotional arc throughout the albums for me. I tend to stop listening to evermore once I reach "no body, no crime"... God that song is awful lol.
I'll sum up some answers that made things click for me
She writes songs spanning many emotions.
Her albums span multiple genres. (I've only heard pop and country, but I'm not a fan.)
She is hard working, prolific, and puts on a show.
So with that combination it seems she has something for everyone. Personally, I only know one TS song, but it's catchy as hell. So there's no song that I hate that happens to TS song either.
About point 2.: I'm a Paul Simon fan and he spans multiple genres, but I wouldn't expect non-fans to know that.
Taylor for me is extremely emotional and autobiographical. I connect emotionally with her songs in a way that allows me to feel what she's feeling. Music is emotional and usually has a message, but for me her music does make me feel more.
Which makes sense, I always loved pink Floyd for their art and what they were trying to say, I usually am an emotional person, and I think for a lot of people that's why she's popular.
You have an emotion you're working through? She's got a song for it.
I'm definitely not a swiftie, but she does have some catchy music, and Shake it off was the default song for getting my kids out of bad moods and over bad days.
I also used to think she was a catty bitch for the way she was caught on camera making a face when Selena Gomez was with Bieber. However since then I've heard her speak about things she cares about and I appreciate her passion and that she's against the things I'm generally against, she definitely seems to care and motivate her swifties to care about the right things, and that makes me tend to support her.
She makes music that a lot of people really like. Often times because they relate. It sounds like it’s not your kind of music, and that’s fine. Not really any more to it.
Things go viral sometimes and it snowballs. The more famous you are, the more famous you can become. She's also good enough at being an entertainer to keep riding the wave of increased fame, with added resources the bigger she gets.
Besides listening to her when she is on the radio from time to time, Taylor Swift was forever carved in my mind when she agreed to have a (now classic) duet with a goat.
I went to a Daddy-Daughter school dance with my kid a few weeks ago, she's in Kindergarten, so it was just a new experience for her going to a dance, we had a good time. However, it's been a while since I've been to any sort of dance function at all (in school or out), but I'm pretty sure that more than half the songs were all Taylor Swift songs. I don't know if that's indicative of white people dance music selections in general, or if this was specific to that function and who they thought the girls wanted to listen to, but her music apparently gets played alot.
I think her popularity might be tied to her relatively clean image. Apart from the serial dating, the racist boyfriend thing, and the wasteful jet planes, she's still fairly clean in the eyes of popular America, she apparently hasn't had a big sex scandal or nude photos leak. Hell, when fake photos of her started spreading everywhere recently, that's when politicians started talking about reigning in and regulating AI Art, and that's been around for years now (even photoshopping images has been a thing for ages).
Funny enough though, my daughter actually hates Taylor Swift.
You could ask this question about any popular artist for the last 70 years, probably longer, why The Beatles, why Elvis Presley, why Michael Jackson, why Madonna?
Cause shes hot and i like her voice. I like her pop stuff better than her country though. There are a few of her country songs i like but very few compared to her pop stuff.
As someone who doesn't really follow any sort of pop media or celebrities, I've often heard her songs around on the radio somewhere but just as often have I heard some other over produced pop singer and couldn't have told you if it was Swift or not.
Oh boy, I think I can help you here. My wife became a huge swiftie part way through my being with her, and I'm a musician myself, so I've ended up accidentally digesting a whole lot of her music extremely thoroughly when I normally would not have.
I already don't listen to the radio, but when I'd heard her songs before I'd casually enjoyed them as catchy hits, but I have come to respect her quite a bit as an artist and genuinely enjoy a good few of her songs. There could be a whole documentary on her success and why, but I'll try to sum it up as best as I understand through accidentally learning the ways of her fans and analyzing her music, even trying to be succint there are a few big points to hit on here, and this will be stupid long, probably two comments.
Her music is very well written and mixed/produced/performed. On its own that doesn't really matter much in the sea of pop artists, but her secret weapon in terms of retaining fans is her variety. Basically, this is what allows the "eras tour" to exist. She started country rock, became synthy pop, rebooted into indie rock, and has now transitioned back into electronic pop, but with a more laid-back vibe than her excitable pop anthem days.
Her songs are mostly very smartly written pop, but her band focused music also has some smart instrumental writing and performances for people who enjoy music more than just for pop catchiness. For instance, the song I most enjoy by her is Tolerate It, which is written in a 5/4 time signature, which is very unusual and interesting for pop music, but the song is so smartly written and the vocals are delivered in a catchy enough way that the listener doesn't even really notice the strange time signature.
To top this point off, her lyrics can be quite good. Mostly, it's just well-written pop again, but on some of her songs, and particularly across the indie rock styled albums Folklore and Evermore the lyrics can be really excellently written and poetic. The subjects of love and loss she predominantly writes about are generally relatable by everyone, and probably very relatable to some, but she also writes about other things on and off, like gender inequality or the loss of family, other very relatable topics for people in general.
Her start in country rock was very down to earth and her immediate talent in songwriting out the gate established a strong cult following early on. Again, this is not a very unique thing for pop artists, but her secret weapon here is that she has retained a very down to earth persona and a feeling of honesty with her fans, which is bolstered by the fact that she writes her own music.
She collaborates with artists, too, but she definitely also has a very strong "author's voice", and if you listen to and analyze enough of her music you can come to understand some of her unique melodic touches and bits of her songwriting that are throughout her whole catalog. This is why I, as a musician, respect her the most. If she just took songs from others it wouldn't be the same thing. It's a bit like Michael Jackson and how he would really give it his all for songs and his personal touch vocally always came through, no matter the genre style he was performing.
She's extremely smart and doesn't breed controversy. If you listen to interviews with her or really hear her talk about anything in depth at all you learn that she knows a shitload of stuff about a lot of things and is very well spoken. She's whip smart and that no doubt has significantly contributed to her success on a business side. She also doesn't do anything evil or controversial aside from the regular mass production of merch and usage of private jets, etc.. her biggest controversies were writing too many breakup songs that got popular, which, compared to many other artists is not even ranking as controversy. For someone who's been in the game for this long that's a big deal for staying power and loyalty. (Continued in second comment)
It's probably closer to why people like trump only the swifties are probably less inclined to kill people that don't like Taylor swift.
Or people really found her whiny breakup song phase relatable. That's probably what got the ball rolling. Then it's just like the Beatles or something but with objectively worse music.
I really don't like any of her songs that I have heard. To be fair I can't recall ever liking any songs that were ever on the radio during the time I have been alive at least.
OP, can you explain why any other celebrity whom you do not follow is popular?
if not, i think your question is unfairly asked
you are framing this as though fame is a question with a simple y=mx+b formula for an answer, as though pop music isn’t a billion dollar industry of hundreds of thousands of creative professionals (not just musicians) vying against one another for their opportunity to make a mark.
with full respect and appreciation for your curiosity, it’s fine to “not get” a person’s music, but that doesn’t mean you are owed an explanation for the entire raison de’tre of the pop culture industry.
Sheep need a god to worship. There have been thousands before her; madonna, elvis, beattles, whos music i could careless less for, and there will be thousands after her
I think she shouldnt be popular, and I guess it's because of marketing. The media companies put her in the spot light a lot, and people got used to her music I guess.
It's not like with Michael Jackson or Madonna where the music were actually very good and creative. This is like pizza I guess, something to listen to that sounds the same as everything else.