Taylor Swift’s Business Savvy Flies in the Face of Modern Marketing

This is the business acceleration we all dream of: a product, popular enough from the get-go 18 years ago, compounding its market each year without fading, suddenly sparking a volume of sales, across sub-products, to have people speculate on its macroeconomic effect. It’s the acceleration you are curious about when you find yourself wearing lettered bracelets, knowing more of her songs than those of the bands that defined your own childhood, encouraging moderation to your 8-year-old daughter plopping 20% of her net worth at a time to buy another checkout-stand magazine, and displaying no great moderation yourself while sitting in one of four seats you bought in the lower bowl of the Superdome — a side view that still set you back the price of a Ford Edge with 50,000 miles. And so, before I sat in those seats, now never to own a used Ford Edge, I read an advance copy of Rob Sheffield’s Heartbreak is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music. He might also be America’s Official Taylor Swift Chronicler: a Rolling Stone journalist covering her for most of her career, a privileged early listener to embargoed albums played for him in Swift’s apartments, and the keeper of the magazine’s regularly updated ranking of Swift’s 274 songs.