Taylor Swift has been a household name for years. We all know who she is, and we all probably know a little too much about her. Why does someone like me, who doesn’t even like her music, know so much about her? I know who she’s dating and what her cats are named (Meredith and Olivia), not to mention who she’s currently feuding with. And the reason we know more about what’s going on in her life than in the lives of our random roommates is because Taylor Swift has mastered the art of media manipulation.
Don’t believe me? Let’s take this back to the time that Swift refused to put her music on Spotify. Back in the day, she took her music off Spotify because she believed “there should be an inherent value placed on art” and that the artists are not fairly compensated. Since then, Spotify has released how the artists are paid, which is by each time the song is streamed and downloaded. She is not wrong about the compensation part; artists do make less money than they would if they simply sold their albums on iTunes because Spotify pays 70 percent of profits to the record label, which then cuts the money that goes to the artists. There are a lot of people to get through before the artist gets their share. However, nearly every other artist is doing it, including some of the biggest names in the game like The Beatles, Drake and Beyoncé.
The kicker is that, throughout the whole ordeal, she manipulated the media to seem like she was the victim to a vicious, greedy plan orchestrated by Spotify. Swift played the part of a “starving artist” when she complains about her cut of the streaming profit in her op-ed to The Wall Street Journal. The funny thing is that she isn’t rich from fans streaming her music — Swift doesn’t make most of her money from selling records — but rather from her international tours. According to Billboard, her 1989 tour in 2014 grossed $173 million dollars, which is way more than what her streaming grossed in the same year: less than $500,000 for domestic streaming, according to Time Magazine. That means that her tour made 346 times more than the music her fans streamed, making her “greedy and short-sighted” for complaining “that her cut from Spotify isn’t big enough,” according to Business Insider’s Dave Smith.
Who can have a conversation about T. Swizzle without mentioning her dating past, right? Let’s do a quick recap. When things ended between her and Calvin Harris, she almost immediately rebounded with British actor Tom Hiddleson. The media had a frenzy when “Hiddleswift” was born when nearly every tabloid had the couple on their front page, fully equipped with grainy photos taken by the paparazzi.
The very public way the pair went about showing off their relationship made people question how genuine it was. According to The Atlantic’s Megan Garber, “The paps might have captured an intimate moment shared between a new couple … [or] one of Hollywood’s oldest institutions: the staged romance.” Hiddleswift did nothing to avoid the paparazzi which is unlike her previous relationship with Harris. Sure, you can’t positively say that Taylor Swift used the media to expose her new relationship to gain popularity or to shove it in the face of her ex. However, it would be in the line of spiteful acts toward her other exes in the past, like writing blatant breakup songs and calling them out in public settings.
If you aren’t convinced yet, I saved the best incident, which showcases her skills as a media manipulator, for last. If you haven’t heard, there was recently a bit of a spat between West, Kim Kardashian and Swift. West and Swift have little bit of history, and their feud was rethatched with West’s new song, “Famous.” Basically, in true Kanye fashion, he sings that he made Swift famous and has a look-a-like laying naked next to him in a bed in the music video. Pretty strange stuff.
When the song came out, Taylor played her classic “I’ve-been-personally-victimized-by-Kanye-West”card by telling interviewers that she had never approved anything for song. Kim Kardashian exposed Swift with a video of Kanye talking to Taylor on the phone about the lyric where she said, “… if people ask me about it I think it would be great for me to be like, ‘Look, he called me and told me the line before it came out. Jokes on you guys, We’re fine.’” Taylor Swift began nitpicking at the wording of the phone call and pointed the blame at the other party to create a victim persona in order to save her own public image, but popular opinion is in favor of West.
For years, Taylor Swift had the media’s heart. The media defended her in situations like the Spotify incident and her breakups almost blindly, simply accepting her side of the story while hardly covering the other parties’ stories. The stories were all about her. Coming from a sweet, country girl background, the public was more inclined to believe her because of her classically believable demeanor. Adoring tween fans didn’t think anything of her many fights with other celebrities or when she demonstrated her greed with big companies.
The same goes for her relationship with Kanye West. He has a past of being outspoken, rude and overbearing so it was easy for people to agree with Taylor Swift in their past feuds, once again, thanks to her demeanor and way of manipulating the media. Thankfully, Swift’s reign as the media-manipulating queen ended when Kim Kardashian properly shut her down, making it hard for the public to easily believe Swift again. Even so, we, as consumers, shouldn’t be so inclined to believe everything we read. Our naiveté when it comes to consuming information in regards to celebrities can lead to believing falsified information and elevating an already highly powerful individual.
