Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly - The Marketing of Taylor Swift: (Taylor's Version)

Episode Date: February 3, 2024

This week, we analyze the remarkable marketing skills of one of the top music artists in the world – Taylor Swift.She has challenged the status quo at every turn – she regained ownership of her master recordings. She convinced Apple and Spotify to pay artists in a more equitable way. She defied Hollywood. She markets her music to her fans in very surprising ways.And holds over 70 Guinness World Records. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly. As you may know, we've been producing a lot of bonus episodes while under the influences on hiatus. They're called the Beatleology Interviews, where I talk to people who knew the Beatles, work with them, love them, and the authors who write about them. Well, the Beatleology Interviews have become a hit, so we are spinning it out to be a standalone podcast series. You've already heard conversations with people like actors Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell, and Beatles confidant Astrid Kershaw. But coming up, I talk to May Pang, who dated John Lennon in the mid-70s. I talk to double fantasy guitarist Earl Slick, Apple Records creative director John Kosh. I'll be talking to Jan Hayworth,

who designed the Sgt. Pepper album cover. Very cool. And I'll talk to singer Dion, who is one of only five people still alive who were on the Sgt. Pepper cover. And two of those people were Beatles. The stories they tell are amazing. So thank you for making this series such a success. And please, do me a favor, follow the Beatleology interviews on your podcast app. You don't even have to be a huge Beatles fan, you just have to love storytelling.

Subscribe now, and don't miss a single beat. This is an apostrophe podcast production. You're so king in it. You're so king in it. Your teeth look whiter than no nose. You're not you when you're hungry. You're a good half with all teeth.

You're under the influence with Terry O'Reilly. Time Magazine began the tradition of selecting a man of the year in 1927. The idea was to identify the person who had done the most to influence the events of the past 12 months. That year, the editors of Time had neglected to feature aviator Charles Lindbergh on the cover. It was an editorial embarrassment, as Lindbergh was a global sensation by becoming the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic. To remedy that oversight, Time decided to feature Lindbergh as the Man of the Year on the cover of the year-end issue. And the tradition thus began. According to Times editor-in-chief, the Man of the Year cover sprung from the Great Man Theory of history,

a belief that individuals have the power to transform society, for better or for worse. The recipient was usually a politician or a titan of industry. Fourteen U.S. presidents, five leaders of Russia, and three popes have been recognized. There have been controversial choices, too, like Hitler and Ayatollah Khomeini. Sometimes it has been an object, like the computer in 1982, and the endangered Earth was named Planet of the Year in 1988. Occasionally, Time recognized a group.

The first time it did so was in 1950, when it chose the American soldier as Men of the Year, as they marched off to fight in Korea. And Time named American women as People of the Year in 1975. In 1999, the title Man of the Year was officially changed to the Gender Neutral Person of the Year, although the winner that year would be Jeff Bezos. Donald Trump said he turned down the offer to be Person of the Year in 2017. Time magazine replied saying there was not a speck of truth to that. Every year, the Time editorial staff gets together to assess the man, woman, group, or concept that had the most influence on the world. The conversations are said to be both entertaining and contentious.

A lot of arguing ensues. But eventually, a consensus takes place, and the cover is revealed every December. This year, Time magazine made an unusual choice for Person of the Year. The editor-in-chief said that every year contains light and dark, and 2023 had significant shades of darkness. In a divided world, this recipient found a way to transcend borders and be a source of light. He said no other person on the planet can move so many people so well.

Achieving this feat is often chalked up to be an alignment of the planets. But that, he said, would ignore her skill and her power. Her name is Taylor Swift, and she is an incredible marketer. You're under the influence. Taylor Swift is the first entertainer in history to receive the title of Time's Person of the Year. In the center section of the magazine, it listed her accomplishments in bullet form.

It took two pages to cover. Here are a few highlights. Earnings from her Eras tour are expected to be $4.1 billion. Only female artist to land three No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200 in a calendar year. Twice. Only female artist to replace herself at No. 1. Twice. Just surpassed Elvis Presley for the most cumulative week spent at number one on the Billboard 200.

She trails only the Beatles. First artist to occupy all top ten spots on the Hot 100 in a single week. Top artist on both Apple and Spotify with 26.1 billion streams. Most Grammy Song of the Year nominations in history. Most awarded artist in the American Music Awards history. Holds over 70 Guinness World Records as of this writing.

Personal net worth, $1.1 billion. Age, 34. Taylor Swift is a remarkable marketer. Her ideas are smart, creative, and surprising. She constantly evolves while maintaining a consistent brand, and nobody in the music business works harder at connecting with their fans. Unlike many other successful artists, she does it all with her music. She doesn't have branded clothing lines, sneakers, liquors, or perfumes. She does collaborations with other artists and partnerships with brands like Capital One and Apple, but those are strategic choices to expand her audience.

And Taylor Swift controls it all. Back in 2005, a 15-year-old country artist named Taylor Swift signed a contract with a company called Big Machine Records. The deal was for six albums. Subsequently, Big Machine Records owned all her master recordings. Meanwhile, Big Machine Records was sold to a private equity group called Ithaca Holdings, owned by a powerful music manager named Scooter Braun. Swift had pleaded with Braun for the chance to own her work. She was then asked to sign a new contract saying she would earn one album back for each new album she recorded. It was an onerous

contract. When the original six-album contract expired, Swift signed a new record deal with Universal's Republic Records and insisted on owning her own music going forward. Not long after, Braun sold her master recordings to yet another holding company for $300 million. That meant this new holding company controlled her master recordings, could decide how her songs were used, and pocket the licensing fees. Taylor Swift said the sale was her, quote, worst case scenario, and said Scooter Braun had repeatedly bullied her. Then Taylor Swift did something bold. She announced she was going to re-record all six original albums. As the songwriter, Taylor Swift was able to re-record those albums legally.

As of this writing, she has released four of the six. She added the words Taylor's version to the album titles to identify them as re-releases. Now, normally people don't want to hear re-recorded versions of favorite songs. But here's the thing. Taylor Swift's fans embraced the re-recorded versions. Those re-recorded albums consistently outperformed the original releases and all went to number one again on the charts. She re-recorded all the songs and added a few other songs from the vault.

Swift promoted these re-recordings just like new albums, with big announcements, full promotion, singles, and new merch. It was a power move. By re-recording her songbook, movie studios and advertisers would come to Swift to license her music now, essentially diminishing the value of her old master

recordings. Lots of recording artists chafe under the yoke of bad record label contracts. Yet rarely would an artist entertain the notion of re-recording their entire back catalog. But in the battle of beloved original songs versus brand new re-recordings, why did her fans choose to go with Taylor? Well, there is an incredible connection between Taylor Swift did her fans choose to go with Taylor? Well, there is an incredible connection between Taylor Swift and her fans. They've dubbed themselves Swifties. These Swifties have been following Taylor Swift's music for years. They don't have favorite songs. They have favorite

eras. Each era in Taylor Swift's life has been preserved in amber on each album. Swifties relate deeply to her storytelling. There's also a lot of Taylor-king going on. Taylor-king is when Taylor quietly watches her fans' social media posts. She gets to know their names, their lives, their ups and their downs. She'll comment on their posts and blow their minds. Taylor Swift is a master at creating a community of fans. As one writer recently said, she manages to scale the unscalable.

Put another way, she gives out bits and pieces of herself to fans that ignites her entire base. She visits fans in hospitals. She sent nurses working on the front lines during the pandemic care packages with personal notes. She has shown up unexpectedly to a fan's bridal shower in Ohio. She paid off another fan's mounting student debt. Swift wrote a charity song called Ronin, based on the blog of a mother who had lost her 3-year-old son Ronin to cancer. Swift gave the mother a writing credit on the song,

it reached number 16 on the Billboard chart, and all proceeds go to a cancer research charity. In 2004, she staged a Swiftmas campaign that went viral, sending out hand-picked gifts to fans with handwritten cards. She invited fans to come and dance in the video for her monster hit hit Shake It Off. She also reached out to fans who were being bullied, explained how she relates to them, and gave them meaningful words of support.

So when fans see her supporting bullied fans, they rallied behind Swift when her record company bullied her. And that's why her re-recorded albums shot to the top of the charts. And sometimes, Taylor even invites her fans over for cookies. Walt Disney once said that the key to success was to give customers everything you could possibly give them.

And Taylor Swift has taken that to heart. Here's proof. When she recorded her album titled 1989, she held what she called secret sessions. Swift literally invited big groups of fans to secret listening parties to hear the new album first. But here's the thing. The listening parties were held in Taylor Swift's homes.

The way she chose the invitation list says a lot about Taylor Swift. She tailored fans on the internet for a year, The way she chose the invitation list says a lot about Taylor Swift. She tailored fans on the internet for a year, quietly looking for super fans who never had the chance to see her before. Fans who couldn't get tickets to her concerts or had camped out on the sidewalk for days only to come up empty-handed when tickets sold out, or they simply couldn't afford them. 89 fans in each of the five cities in the U.S. and the U.K. were contacted by Swift's team,

told they were invited to a special top-secret event, they were asked to meet at a specified spot, then they were bused to a second location. They had no idea what they were in for. We're calling you from TaylorSwift.com and no idea what they were in for. We're calling you from taylorswift.com and we have this awesome opportunity for you. It's nervous excitement right now because we have no idea what's going on

except that we're on a bus and going somewhere. What the fans didn't know was that they were being bused to one of Taylor Swift's homes. Meanwhile, Swift was at home baking cookies and getting ready for her guests. So this is the first of the secret sessions, which are little mini living room house parties where I'm going to be playing my fans the album first. So we wanted to surprise them and they're here, they're out like mingling and eating and things like that.

I'm sure they know something's going on, but I don't know if they think this is going on. As the fans sat in anticipation in the living rooms, Swift popped in. Then she played her new 1989 album, met everyone, took pictures with each of the 89 guests, then danced with them all in the living room. Check it out on YouTube. There was a lot of joy in those living rooms. We all got to meet her and take a picture with her. Mommy took our Polaroids with her.

She just took her time with every single person, and that meant a lot to me. When I saw Taylor Swift explaining her fan listening parties on the Graham Norton Show, Norton and the other celebrities couldn't believe she was inviting fans into her home. They were shocked. But Taylor Swift said she loved it, and the fans were amazing. Those listening parties were bucket list thrills for fans, and an extraordinary act of fan

appreciation. I've been waiting for Paul McCartney to invite me into his living room since 1967. Another thing Taylor Swift does often is create hidden Easter eggs in her work. In the liner notes in CDs and vinyl records, random letters on lyrics are capitalized while the rest are in her work. In the liner notes in CDs and vinyl records, random letters on lyrics are capitalized while the rest are in lowercase. Fans realized that if you strung all the capital letters together, they were encoded

messages. In a song called Picture to Burn about a cheating ex, the letters form the sentence Date Nice Boys. In a song called Best Day, the letters form the sentence, Date Nice Boys. In a song called Best Day, the capital letter spelled, God Bless Andrea Swift,

a tribute to her mom as her parents were going through a divorce. And in a song titled Fifteen, the letters, when strung together, said, I cried when recording this. But the Easter eggs go beyond the lyrics. Every Taylor Swift album has its own vibe, aesthetic, and color scheme.

So she will start wearing that particular color months before a new album comes out. When Swift started tweeting red heart emojis, fans instantly knew the next re-recorded album was going to be the one titled Red. Fans will then pour through her older albums looking for clues to her upcoming song titles, which triggers record sales and millions of streams.

Even her videos contain Easter eggs. In one video, there is a dollar bill sitting next to Swift. A subtle reference to a lawsuit where she accused a powerful DJ of sexual assault. He sued her for $3 million. She countersued

for $1. The jury sided with Swift. In the video, Look What You Made Me Do from the Reputation album, there are literally thousands of Easter eggs. It may take fans decades

to find them all. Swift is patient. She drops clues that foreshadow things that haven't arrived yet, and fans excitedly work together to break down the codes. As Swift says, quote,

it's really about turning new music into an event for my fans and trying to entertain them in playful, mischievous, clever her history-making Eras Tour. Instead of breaking a new album, she decided to celebrate 17 years of recording, dedicating a section of the concert to each album era. Most major recording artists travel with one huge stage for a concert tour. Think the Rolling Stones or Katy Perry. For the Eras Tour, Taylor Swift created a different staging for each of the eras. So, for a set list of 44 songs, there's 10 distinctive sets for the 10 different eras. All designed by her in-house Taylor Swift Tour production company.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the tour is one of the most expensive and ambitious of the 21st century. The staging takes about two to three weeks to transport and assemble. Because of that, Swift is only playing big cities and settles in for three or four nights in each town. She's playing a six-night stand in Toronto in November, the first artist to ever play six shows at the Rogers Centre. It's sold out. Over 300,000 people will attend those concerts,

the equivalent of a mid-sized Canadian city. The tour includes 151 shows on five continents. One concert stop alone has a waiting list of 2.8 million Swifties. Her team has created powerful marketing for the tour. There's a loyalty program. Fans who buy her albums and merchandise or share her content are pushed further up the priority list to land hard-to-get tickets. There are also exclusive pre-show events, surprise meet-and-greets, online contests, and Swift engages directly with her fans on TikTok, providing regular updates as the tour progresses. And by the way,

she's gifting her sound technicians, caterers, dancers, truck drivers, and other valued tour staff over $55 million in bonuses. In a brilliant marketing move, Taylor Swift brought her era's tour to the big screen. The three-hour concert film reportedly cost $15 million to make, and Swift funded it herself. When it came to distributing the movie, her team met with Hollywood Studios but didn't like the deals they were presented with. Then her father, Scott Swift, had a crazy idea. Why not skip the Hollywood Studios and distribute the film directly to theaters themselves. Theater chain AMC gladly took the offer, putting the film in over 8,500 screens in nearly 100 countries. The ticket price? $19.89. AMC reported the most tickets ever sold in an hour. The company said it rivaled the excitement of the early Beatles films.

With only two entities sharing profits and no middlemen, AMC will make 43% of the revenues and Taylor will pocket the other 57%. Opening weekend became the highest-grossing concert film of all time, raking in $93 million, the second-biggest October movie opening ever. Time magazine states that Swift stands to make about $100 million from the movie. And remember this, she has released the entire era's tour in theaters,

while the era's tour is still in motion. She has no fear that it will eat into ticket sales, as all her shows are already sold out. Millions of her fans who couldn't get tickets or live in small towns are lining up for the movie. And fans lucky enough to have been to her concert go to the movie to see the show up close and personal, instead of watching it on a jumbo screen in the stadiums. After only seven weeks of

release, the film had grossed over $250 million. The era's tour film also helped rescue movie theaters, who had just come off lean pandemic years and the Hollywood strikes. Let's talk the Taylor effect. Swift's earnings from her tour will be more than the yearly economic output of 42 countries. Time magazine reports that Swifties have boosted the U.S. economy

by $5.7 billion as each concert goer spends an average of $1,300 each. Airbnb even sees record-setting demands in each city Taylor visits. Recently,

she started dating Travis Kelsey, all-star tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs of the NFL. That caused his jersey sales to jump 400%, and his games saw a massive increase in viewership. There are at least 10 college classes devoted to Taylor's music, including one at Harvard. And in maybe the most Swifsonian moment of all, Taylor released 8 Seconds of Static on iTunes by mistake in 2014. Those 8 seconds went to number one in Canada. Taylor Swift was once interviewed by Vogue magazine. They asked her this,

If you were not a singer, what would you be doing? She answered saying she would probably be in advertising, dreaming up concepts and slogans. Well, that doesn't surprise me. She has succeeded in combining both worlds, as she is a singer who is a marketing force of nature. Taylor Swift is that rare artist who can sell 200 million records in an era when music is virtually free on streaming services. She is a self-made billionaire without any side hustles. She is re-recording her entire back catalog

to maintain control over her destiny. iHeart Radio, the largest radio network in America, has agreed to only play her re-recorded versions going forward. She is an artist who locks arms with her fans over issues that mean something to them, and they lock arms with her in return. World leaders beg her to perform in their countries. She has dared to confront the status quo. She stood up to a powerful music DJ and won. She wanted to regain ownership of her master recordings and won. She challenged Apple and Spotify to pay artists in a more equitable way and won.

She defied Hollywood and won. Through it all, she is a global phenomenon that feels intimate and genuine by going above and beyond the call with her fans. And that is the definition of incredible marketing when you're under the influence. I'm Terry O'Reilly. This episode was recorded in the Terrastream Airstream mobile recording studio. Producer, Debbie O'Reilly.

Sound engineer, Jeff Devine. Research, Allison Pinches. Under the Influence theme by Ari Posner and Ian Lefevre. Tunes provided by APM Music. Follow me on social at Terry O Influence. This podcast is powered by ACAST. And if you'd like to read next week's fun fact, just go to apostrophepodcasts.ca and follow the prompts. See you next week. Hi, this is Ken Milne from London, Ontario. Fun fact! In Seattle, fans at Taylor Swift's concert actually generated enough seismic activity to create a minor earthquake, measuring 2.3 on the Richter scale.