MSP.EX [] Why We Love Taylor Swift

Hello and welcome to this MSPX-RAN now. We don't have a full episode for you this week because my co-host Jeff fell into a particle accelerator earlier this week and it's taking the guys that so longer to reassemble him than they thought. So today we're going to be talking about a topic, MSP doesn't touch on very often and that's Taylor Swift. Now it has to be said I'm probably not your average Taylor Swift fan.

I probably don't have that much to say about her music but I did want to talk about her today because of the way that she is using her power, using her influence to actually help to shape the music industry of the future, especially in the way that she's working to give more power back to artists and she's using her own success as a vehicle to give those artists who are doing not as well as her, giving them a much better deal. So the story came out earlier this week. The story is that Swift left her former record label which is called Big Machine and she's left it for one of the the huge conglomerate labels, Universal Music Group, also known as UMG. Now Big Machine is a Nashville based independent and that's been her home for her last six albums.

She signed there when I think she was 15 years old. Now it's not that much of a change. It's not as big a change that seems because Big Machine was and is distributed by Universal. So the way that we access and receive Swift's music is not going to change massively but it's the terms of that deal that I think are so interesting and worth talking about today.

So before we do that I guess we should talk a little bit about how the music industry typically structures deals with artists. So generally when you sign you get a lump sum in advance and that's to pay for recording the record label will also help you with costs for marketing travel. A lot of the costs involved around putting an album together, putting singles out, making videos but that money is essentially alone. So that means that the majority of artists that are signed by label make no money either for themselves or for that label because music is based on trends.

So when you release a record some people are going to like it, some people aren't so not every record that gets released turns into a Rihanna and even amongst those artists who are quite successful there's an even smaller percentage of them who are able to turn that success into a long-term career. So the big artists become really really important to the label. One of those artists with a huge either a huge or a really underperforming new record can make the difference between profit and loss even for these enormous publicly listed record companies and that means that these big stars actually have enormous power over the labels and where Swift is a little bit different from most of her peers is that she uses that power to help other artists. So the question is why do the labels agree to these terms?

Well now we're in this kind of digital age it's a lot harder for record companies to operate in the kind of golden days of the industry. I mean if you look at the kind of 1950s through to the mid to late 1990s the record labels had their own studios they controlled producers they of course controlled all the pressing plants so if you wanted to print up CDs or cassettes or vinyl you had to go through the record labels of course they also had teams for marketing and they had their own teams for getting your songs played on radio or tv or places like MTV. So the labels in that period really were your gatekeeper if you wanted a career in music so if you wanted to be a star you had to sign with one of these labels. Now of course things are a little bit different.

You can upload a youtube video and you can be turned into a star overnight. This new environment gives a lot more power to the artists so if big artists decide that they want more than the royalty that is generally given by a record label they can actually decide to go it alone. They can do their own deals with the streaming services, they can do their own promotion, they can do their own marketing, they can do all their own styling. So labels now have to be a lot more flexible with their big stars but most of the stars use that power obviously to enrich themselves.

Whereas Taylor Swift throughout her career has used her position to help other artists. She has campaigned against Apple Music who had a practice of offering no royalties to artists during the free trial period when you tried the service. She has also campaigned for better payments for artists from Spotify for their free ad supported tier. It would be quite easy for an artist like her just to build those exemptions for herself.

So to go that extra mile is a really admirable and quite selfless act. What's unusual about Taylor Swift's deal with Universal is that she's included a clause in her contract that actually compels the label to do something for other artists and that is certainly the first time I've ever heard of it. In this instance it's to do with Spotify again. Sony Universal and Warner, the big three record companies all took shares in Spotify a few years ago and they pledged that they would share the profits of the sale of that stock with their own artists.

Swift's contract contains a clause that Universal shares money with all artists no matter what their debt to the label. So as I said this is an artist making use of her power and her strength especially when it comes to this kind of digital and technology dominated side of the industry using that power to enrich other artists. So for this reason MSP is a Taylor Swift fan. Of course this is a technology show so we will push it a little bit further and we have to ask a question as well.

Do labels still need human artists like Taylor Swift? You know if it's so hard to make money from human artists you have to wonder why they bother and we are seeing more virtual artists especially from countries like Japan where you have manga characters for example embarking on singing careers but typically there is a human voice underneath that. Now we already have a lot of studio tools like AutoTune which can treat voices and make them sound a lot more mechanical so it isn't inconceivable that we will be able to simply bypass that approach and program the singing and use tools like AutoTune to actually manufacture voices. Sony for example has an artificial intelligence that can compose music in lots of different genres and styles and can even adopt the style of different artists.

On episode 52 of MSP we talked about the hologram technology that is allowing dead artists to literally come back from the dead and perform live and of course that same technology could be used to create live shows for artists who have never actually existed. That's the kind of future I would be betting on if I were a label just cut out the artist completely keep a hundred percent of the money for yourselves and not have to worry about all of these troublesome clauses and percentages and royalties. That's about it for today's show for this MSP Extra. MSP will be back for a full episode next week we hope the Jeff gets out of the particle accelerator without too many screws to hold them together.

If you do like these shows come and subscribe on your favorite podcast app we're on Spotify and YouTube as well you can stream the shows and there are transcripts as well at our website culturepop.com I'm at Armitage Thank you for listening.