The ubiquity of the pop superstar speaks to her enormous talent – while also reflecting how narrow and repetitive the industry has become
The US may be a republic, but it still has a queen. Her name is Taylor Swift and her reign is only just getting started.
The 33-year-old recently became the first woman, and only the third artist ever, to have four albums in the Top 10 of the US album chart simultaneously. The sun never sets on Swift’s empire: club nights that play only Swift songs have popped up in the UK and Australia, while her Eras tour is on track to be the most lucrative ever; it is expected to crack $1bn in revenue.
But her concerts aren’t putting money into the singer’s pockets alone; they have boosted the hospitality industries in cities across the world, making serious economists pay attention and giving rise to the concept of “Swiftonomics”.
Swift is an extremely gifted musician and performer. Her success is well deserved. Nevertheless, her dominance of the airwaves has a negative side. The ubiquitous nature of Swift – the fact that you are almost guaranteed to hear her if you switch on the radio or meander down a high street – doesn’t just speak to her talents, but also to the homogenisation of pop music. It’s not just your imagination: a growing body of research shows that all modern pop music sounds the same.
In 2012, for example, the Spanish National Research Council published an analysis of nearly half a million songs released between 1955 and 2010, which showed that the “diversity of … note combinations … has consistently diminished in the last 50 years”. And pop music isn’t just becoming more similar; taste-makers are also focusing on a smaller subset of songs. “Radio stations … are pushing the boundaries of repetitiveness to new levels,” noted a 2014 article in the Atlantic. “Top 40 stations last year played the 10 biggest songs almost twice as much as they did a decade ago.”
An increasingly data-driven music industry means there is a growing focus on replicating hits and far less space for nurturing originality. Technology may have given us multiple new ways to listen to music, but increasingly we are hearing the same old tune.
