You have also shown your willingness to take on the system. Even better, you have gone to battle against power brokers in the music business—and have won!
And that’s just a start. You’re also proving that live music not only can survive, but actually flourish in the digital age. Other superstars have taken the easy way out—playing shows for high rollers in Las Vegas or setting up shop on Broadway for tourists and elites.
But you didn’t do that, Taylor Swift. You’re bringing live music everywhere, creating the most popular music tour in history. The numbers blow my mind. You’re taking your music to five continents, showing people in a hundred cities that a concert can be the biggest entertainment event of the year.
Your total tour revenues are more than the GDP of most nations. In Singapore alone, more people tried to buy concert tickets than the entire population of the country. In the US, 2.4 million people purchased tickets the first day they went on sale—that’s never happened before.
By the time your tour ends, you will have generated more demand for live music than any artist in history—with huge beneficial effects for everybody. When you show up in town, it gives a Super Bowl-sized boost to the entire local economy.
Along the way, you have made so many other contributions to the music ecosystem. You treat everyone generously—paying out $50 million in bonuses to your team. Even truck drivers got $100,000 bonuses. You’ve also made donations to food banks, employed locals, and have even purchased carbon credits at twice the level of the emissions of your tour.
You also revitalized physical music media by convincing a million or so fans to buy their first vinyl album—boosting demand for LPs to levels not seen since the last century. You’ve actually done more to help record stores than the record business.
Nobody else is doing these kinds of things with such impact. It’s not even close.
So I feel that destiny has blessed us.
For the first time in ages, the superstar musician at the top of the hierarchy is brave, independent, generous, and willing to take a hard stand in changing the system. You stand up for artist rights. You stand up for live music. You stand up for people. And you do all this with a grass roots power base that nobody can match—no politician, no billionaire technocrat, and certainly no other performer.
Musicians have never had that kind of visionary leader.
by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker | Read more:
Images: YouTube/ Michael Hicks)
