When Taylor Swift released her debut record in 2006, the music industry was in free fall. Record labels mourned “the death of the album” as downloads of individual songs outpaced CD sales for the first time. In New York City, the beloved punk venue CBGB closed, the victim of exorbitant rent prices in an ever-gentrifying neighborhood. All across the country, Tower Records stores were liquidated and sold. And overseas in Stockholm, a small company called Spotify was launched.
Videos by American Songwriter
Swift was 16 years old at the time, and she didn’t understand the volatility of the world she was about to inherit. What she did understand was what it felt like to be a Millennial at the dawn of the new digital age. This was the era of MySpace, Tumblr, and LiveJournal—a time when young people wore their broken hearts on their sleeves and wrote long blog entries about their own vulnerabilities. Swift’s country songs about breakups and insecurities became part of this new generation’s soundtrack, and her debut record was an immediate hit, remaining on the Billboard 200 for 275 weeks.
Still Selling After All These Eras
Nearly two decades later, Swift still hasn’t left the charts. She has dominated the streaming era, racking up more spins on Spotify and Apple Music than any other female in history. At the same time, she still makes genuine albums, too—and has sold more than 200 million of them, which makes her one of the best-selling artists of all time. When she released Midnights in 2022, the record sold 1.5 million copies in its first week, a feat that’s so unprecedented during the digital age that the only other album to accomplish it is…another Swift album: 1989 (Taylor’s Version).
Part of the appeal is Swift’s ability to erase the boundaries between genre, geography, and generation. She lived in Nashville for a decade, from ages 14 to 24, and the city’s identity as a country music powerhouse left a mark on the albums she made there. With 1989, she rebranded herself not only as a cosmopolitan New Yorker, but also as a pop artist who wouldn’t let herself be limited by traditional radio formats. 1989 widened her audience far beyond the country realm, and each album that followed explored new sounds: the hard-hitting electronics of reputation; the bright pop of Lover; the indie-folk of folklore and evermore; the nocturnal grooves of Midnights. For a modern world weaned on Spotify playlists, Swift was her own genre-jumping jukebox, jumping from one style to the next, unafraid to cast the widest net possible.
Still Innovating on Stage
In 2023, as Ticketmaster’s unpredictable prices led to public outcry and even a Senate hearing, Swift helped restore public faith in the live concert experience with The Eras Tour. Grossing more than $13 million per show, it became the second highest-grossing tour of all time after just 56 concerts, with nearly 100 additional shows to go.
The Eras Tour was a combination of sound, spectacle, and sheer endurance, rooted in a 44-song setlist and split into 10 different segments—or eras—that each focused on a specific album. For younger fans in the audience, these shows were a masterclass in the importance of the album as a time capsule, as something cohesive, as something worth honoring. Even at the peak of her career, on the vanguard of an industry that had evolved far beyond the album era, Swift still found a way to draw attention back to her records themselves.
Still Doing Things Her Way
She found a way to gain ownership of those albums, too. When her back catalog was sold to Kanye West’s manager, Scooter Braun, in 2019, Swift fought back by rerecording her old material and releasing it with her new label, Republic Records. What initially sounded like a painstaking process turned out to be a brilliant business maneuver. Those rerecorded albums have all become No. 1 hits on the Billboard 200, with 1989 (Taylor’s Version) even outselling the original—during its first week. In the wake of that success, labels like Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group have all begun altering the contracts they’re offering new clients, hoping to prevent other artists from following similar “their version” paths.
Swift isn’t the only artist to release replicated versions of older material, nor is she the first. Back in 2012, Def Leppard reached a stalemate with Universal Music over royalty rates, prompting the band to recreate classics like “Pour Some Sugar on Me” and “Hysteria” and release them with a different label. When those new recordings were released digitally, they generated more headlines than consumer interest. Swift’s re-recordings, on the other hand, have all been genuine hits, and it was only after 1989 (Taylor’s Version) went platinum in one week that label execs began frantically pumping the brakes.
Swift hasn’t just dominated the music industry during the past decade; she’s shaped it to suit her own needs.
Photo by Charley Gallay/Getty Images for The Weinstein Company
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