Taylor Swift is not strictly speaking a movie-related topic, or at least this was true until recently. With The Eras Tour still currently (as of Jan. 7) ranking as the highest domestic-grossing film of the 2023 fall, her influence as a multi-entertainment, multi-hyphenate superstar has been unavoidable this fall.
Okay, that was enough to justify that this topic has relevance this page. Let’s get to it.
For over 15 years, and all my time from middle school onward, Taylor Swift has meant a great deal to me. I devoured early projects like Fearless (2008) and Red (2012) and watched her popularity balloon with 1989 (2014). Of course, nothing could have prepared me for her success since folklore and evermore in 2020.
For a while, I enjoyed watching her much-deserved victory lap, but 2023 provided a lot of times that gave me pause.
We start toward the end of 2022 with Midnights and the ensuing TicketMaster debacle as fans bought tickets for The Eras Tour. I know Midnights has its fans, but I’m not among them. More than anything I find the content of the album mean-spirited, and I generally think it’s not as thoughtfully composed or as inventively produced as previous works. I can see why it was a hit, but I don’t think many clear-headed people would rank it among her top artistic achievements.
It was soon apparent that Midnights had one main job and that was launching The Eras Tour. As a spectacle (from what I can gather from the concert film), it was quite the event to experience. But it was quite the ordeal to get there. The failure of TicketMaster to process demand in a coherent way is now legendary, and litigious as it prompted legal action, too.
I don’t put the responsibility for TicketMaster failing on Swift. Though it certainly seems that she and her people could have done a better job prognosticating demand (note that the AMC app broke in a similar fashion in August 2023), it’s not her fault that TicketMaster is terrible. But if anything could be the catalyst for industry change in the ticket business, this event was it. However, in the aftermath of this disaster, change did not come. Swift had an opportunity to stand up for her fans and wield her actual power in the world of entertainment to improve the system, and she didn’t. She didn’t have to do this of course, and I’m sure Eras Tour prep was a hassle, but I can’t help but thinking that Taylor of ten years ago would have used this opportunity to enforce real change that would instrumentally improve the experience of the fan.
This was the first time of many in the last year or so that something happened regarding Swift that made me, a longtime fan, sit back and go “huh.” Next was the breakup with Joe Alwyn, reported in April of 2023. I don’t know about Alwyn as a person, and I wasn’t surprised that they didn’t “make it” or whatever. But often celebrity breakups are a sign of more substantial problems that come to light later. When comedian John Mulaney fell off the wagon and went to rehab, the first thing I’d heard was that he and Anna had split up.
The breakup was nothing compared to the rebound, a short-lived and strange relationship with The 1975’s front man Matt Healy. This might not have been the last straw for myself and many other Swift fans, but this was definitely a large straw. If fandom is a Jenga tower, this was pulling a side piece and forcing a redistribution of weight on a less stable foundation. Matt Healy is a pretty terrible person. In February 2023 (i.e. not old tweets from a decade ago), he went on a podcast and said things so offensive and racist that Apple and Spotify—the platform that still platforms The Joe Rogan Experience—pulled the episode. This scratches the surface of the controversy iceberg with Healy. If you want to read a LOT more, you can do so here. Suffice to say it was very shocking to see Taylor associate with anyone like Healy, let alone in a dating capacity.
Of course Swift is “allowed” to date whoever she wants, but it’s perfectly reasonable for fans to note the (increasingly blatant) hypocrisy between the liberal-ish values she heartily promotes in songs like “You Need to Calm Down” and her real life behavior and associations.
But the tower stood, and the incredible experience of The Eras Tour—in person or in film form—got many fans back on her side…until three major events of the last few months.
I’ll start with the simplest one: she made The Eras Tour available digitally only as a rental (not for purchase, digital or in physical form), and took the Reputation concert film off Netflix. Within the current (incredibly upsetting) logic of content manipulation, both moves make sense, but they are profound betrayals to the fans. The lone reason, as best as I can tell, for removing Reputation from Netflix is to have sole possession of it. Similarly, fans can have no ownership—metaphorical or literal—over The Eras Tour film. It remains with Swift to manipulate or put into whatever vault she wants. Just because it’s the way that everyone else does things doesn’t make it right. And there was a time when Swift actually was for the fans.
But she’s a billionaire now. This happened in October, and while it was inevitable—with The Eras Tour film grossing 250 million and the tour grossing a billion—it’s still very disappointing and upsetting. There are no ethical billionaires. There are no ethical ways to make a billion dollars. And no ethical person can have a billion dollars. At such a level of wealth, I lose all remaining respect for you as a person because you’ve ceased to be a person. Your personhood has been trumped and co-opted by your complicity in capitalist systems that create billionaires. Swift has never had a good reply for her private jet use scandals, and this is the same reckless capitalist existence on a massive scale.
You don’t accidentally become a billionaire. You get there by playing capitalism’s stupid game and winning its stupid prizes.
I can’t support or be a fan of billionaire in the way that I supported or was a fan of a girl in a room on a typical Tuesday night. As I wrote this, I thought that, perhaps, I was at fault for not ramping down my fandom incrementally. But then I stumbled on just how ridiculously fast Taylor’s net worth exploded.
In 2017, Forbes reported Swift’s net worth was 280 million.
In 2020, it was up slightly to 365 million.
In June 2023, it was 740 million—essentially double what it was three years earlier.
And in October 2023, it’s 1.1 billion.
Her net worth TRIPLED in 3 years. Though in a very different way, Swift, like fellow billionaires like Jeff Bezos, got very rich since the pandemic began.
As such, I’m going to cut myself slack for not recognizing the change that comes with this wealth as quickly as I could have. Net worth doesn’t triple in 3 year’s time very often, and it’s very reasonable that I didn’t notice the change as it happened.
But now, the Old Taylor is actually dead.
The version of Swift that wrote that song did so nearly a billion dollars ago. The version of her that decided to rerecord it (that was 2019 news) did so over 700 million dollars ago.
A billion dollars is an illogical and incomprehensible amount of wealth, and, as such, I will no longer be surprised or disappointed by the choices Swift makes. Perhaps I’ll still be able to enjoy the music (it helps that everything through evermore was still reasonably in this “Old Taylor” time), but the fandom is gone. The tower has crumbled.
I would hope that this is enough reason to reconsider things, but if it still isn’t, here’s the reason I wrote the piece in the first place.
The third major event was her relationship with Travis Kelce (fun fact: his net worth is 40 million, less than Swift’s cat). Like with Matt Healy, this was a “what is happening” kind of moment, but Kelce certainly seems by all accounts to be a less repugnant person than Healy. But, as noted before, we’ve passed the time point where one could raise reasonable questions about Swift’s decision-making. Relationship with Kelce has brought Taylor into orbit with other people, namely Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes and his wife Brittany. Well, Patrick’s brother Jackson is soon to stand trial for accusations of sexual battery, and Brittany has tweeted her support of Jackson. Swift has done nothing to distance herself from Brittany or any of the parties involved.
It’s yet another thing that gave pause and raised ire at her hypocrisy, enough to make me write this whole thing. What was the last straw? Take your pick. But the Taylor Swift I cared about for 15 years is gone.
The end.
