The keys to the ‘Swiftie’ passion: Taylor Swift the ‘mastermind’ of the business: The American artist will perform two concerts on Wednesday and Thursday at the Santiago Bernabéu stadium

Beyond her talent as a singer and performer, especially since she became the only artist with four Grammys for Album of the Year, Taylor Swift has become the center of a global passion that experts attribute, as one of her songs says, to her “mastermind”.

Sebas Alonso, director of the specialized media Jenesaispop, highlights how Swift has known how to listen to the market to progressively expand her market. First with the leap from the more accessible ‘country’, but that limited her to the United States during her first three albums, to the most global pop with ‘Red’. “Then she lost the Grammy for best album to Daft Punk’s ‘Random Access Memories’; she realized that she didn’t have a very cohesive album and decided to make ‘1989’ influenced by the critics,” Alonso says of another of the milestones of her career, which was endorsed by an artist as renowned as Ryan Adams.

The third major recording milestone of her career, also in the midst of the pandemic, was her alliance with Aaron Dessner as producer, from which ‘Folklore’ and ‘Evermore’ emerged, “changing her ‘target’ towards an ‘underground’ audience that began to take her more seriously”.
Taylor Swift has repeatedly revolted against the conception of the artist as the last link in a business for which she merely produces content, not art.

That was clear when she challenged Spotify and withdrew her music from the platform after publishing an article in The Wall Street Journal entitled ‘Valuable things deserve to be paid’, seeking fair compensation from the ‘streaming’. Similar criticisms against Apple Music led the company to publicly apologize and amend its position. Moreover, Taylor Swift ended up being the image of the movement. Another move in defense of her rights came after artist manager Scooter Braun stripped her of all control over the first part of her discography. She then decided to re-record all the ‘lost’ albums and they surpassed the success of the originals, in a crusade shared by all her fans.

“A lot of people have re-recorded her songs, like Blondie, but she took the opportunity to broaden her context and update her discourse, true to her sound, but re-reading songs like ‘All Too Well’, which had not been as a single and which she extended to 10 minutes in length. All of that has a lot of value,” says Sebas Alonso.

This demand for respect was also progressively reflected in the narrative of her songs. From being a somewhat peaceful girl, impassive victim for example of Kanye West’s attacks, she went on to vent her frustrations, often sentimental, as seen in ‘I Know You Were Trouble’ or ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together’. However, years would pass in which she was reproached for being too lukewarm in her condemnation of politics, with ‘Trumpism’ in vogue, and policies that preyed on women and the LGTBQ+ collective, her main source of followers.

In the end, she ended up siding with Joe Biden, something that was considered to be decisive not only for the previous elections, but also for the next ones. She suffered from those criticisms and that’s why she decided to shake off the image of a good girl as seen in the documentary ‘Miss Americana’, which allowed us to learn more about her prolific songwriting skills. But in the opinion of the experts consulted by EFE, the huge following she has garnered cannot be explained solely by her artistic qualities. For Pablo Benítez de Lugo, who works as a business lead at Accenture Song, “no one has understood Taylor Swift as a company like she does”.

“All artists have huge teams at their service to advise them, but you can tell that she is the one in charge with all the focus, with courageous decisions and a strategic mind, which perfectly measures the timing of everything,” he says, before highlighting how she pursues “excellence” in areas that compensate for her limitations in other areas. She may not stand out as a dancer, have a special move or exceptional vocal qualities, but in return she continues to take care of everything technical, whether in her recordings, in her video clips and in the production of her shows.

“It is very special the relationship with the fans, which is much more direct, she pays close attention to everything that is said,” says Diego Pernas, an expert in digital communication, before a bond almost of friend and listener. As an example, when she wrote her song ‘Snow On The Beach’ with Lana del Rey after her fans lamented that the other artist was barely heard.

For them, Taylor Swift has turned her creations into playgrounds full of hidden winks that only they could notice, the so-called ‘easter eggs’.
“Many songs are related to each other, such as ‘Cardigan’, ‘Betty’ and ‘August’, in which she narrates a love triangle from all points of view, and that makes her followers look for that story within the story,” says Sebas Alonso. On Wednesday and Thursday, Swift will put on two shows at the renovated Santiago Bernabeu stadium in Madrid, the only two concerts in Spain of his celebrated ‘Eras Tour’.