No conspiracy theory necessary: The stars have aligned for her, as fate sometimes does for people who have talent and put in the work.
Charlie and Jeff and Jonah Goldberg have already ably skewered the too-online conspiracy-theory dudes on the MAGA right (and yes, nearly all of them are male) who have talked themselves into arguing (and maybe even in some cases believing) that the dramatic surge in popular attention to pop star Taylor Swift, and her romance with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, are some sort of conspiratorially arranged “psyop” organized by Joe Biden’s White House, Big Pharma, and other shady figures too numerous to name. Never mind that Joe Biden couldn’t organize a sentence coming out of his own mouth. These people are doing an excellent job of permanently discrediting themselves.
It can seem as if the explosion of interest in Swift came out of nowhere, and this can seem all the more inexplicable because Swift has been releasing albums and getting played on the radio since 2006. Swift has been making music so long she first attracted attention on MySpace. Why now? It’s the failure to understand the answer to that question that helps feed a desire for conspiratorial explanations. It’s not actually all that mysterious. At the risk of crossing Michael and his eminently reasonable plea to just stop feeding the beast of the Taylor Swift Discourse, I have in the past tried to offer a rational framework for understanding interest in topics as diverse as the Roman Empire, Fifties nostalgia, immigration and demographic change, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, so I may as well try my hand at an explainer for the Swift boomlet of the past year for those of our readers who are not intimately familiar with Swift, her music, and her career.
Full disclosure: As a 52-year-old man, I’m well outside the target audience for Swift — but then, at 34, Swift herself is closer to her 50th birthday than to her 18th. My wife and 17-year-old daughter are fans, and my older daughter went through a Swift phase in her early teens, so I’ve had extensive exposure to her and her music. There’s a lot of it I can’t stand, especially over the past five albums, but I still appreciate good pop-rock enough that I have 17 of her songs in my iTunes library. When Swift played the East Coast on her 2023 tour, especially in Foxboro, my Facebook feed was full of friends my age (male and female) taking their daughters to see her.
First, there are a bunch of solid baseline reasons why Swift has been successful, and why she has built a large and especially devoted fanbase. She accumulated audiences across two music genres, having originally started as a country star. But unlike your typical country star’s southern drawl and backwoods persona, Swift grew up in an upper-middle-class household in Pennsylvania, so she was able to seamlessly cross over into being a pop star. Quibble all you like with how much credit should be shared with songwriting partners, but she’s produced a lot of catchy hits. She’s hardworking and prolific, having produced ten studio albums, only once (with 2017’s Reputation) taking more than a two-year break between albums. Since 2018, she’s starred in three concert films, two documentaries, and a long-form music video as well as acting in two films (one of them the much-discussed fiasco of the theatrical version of Cats).
Her sound has evolved enough over time to stave off boredom; there’s a big journey from the straightforward pop-rock of 2012’s Red to the moody folk of her 2020 albums to the more dance-pop sound of her latest album. She actively cultivates a personal connection with fans. Her lyrics tend toward the personal and the confessional, and have charted the different stages in her life (as traced by Kayla Bartsch) from teenagerdom to her early thirties, which allows her female fans to see themselves in her words even when she has often sung about life as a famous pop star dating rich and famous men and traveling to posh and exotic places. Her Everywoman averageness (as assessed by Abigail Anthony) is rolled up in a package that fits the glamorous visual bill for a pop star: tall, blond, lanky, stylish, and with distinctive elfin features. As a representative of the cultural zeitgeist, she reflects the same mixture of aspiration and old-fashioned feminine normality that drove the popularity of the Barbie movie, including the tension between wanting the “something more for myself” counseled by modern feminism while yearning for the same things young women have always yearned for — including dating a big, manly football player.
Second, on the “why now?” question, Swift is at precisely the right place in her career. The arc of a popular musician’s career tends to follow two intersecting lines. On the one hand, radio airplay has always favored youth. For reasons partly of creativity and partly of radio tastes, musicians tend to have most of their hits between their late teens and early thirties. For women in pop music, that skews even earlier, and changes in the radio landscape over the past two decades have accelerated that. Swift is no exception: If you look at Top 40 airplay, she had her first Top Ten hit at age 18, her first No. 1 at 19, peaked with a string of No. 1 hits at age 24–25, had her (for now) last No. 1 at 28, and her last Top Ten hit at 29. That’s four and a half years ago. On the other hand, concert tours favor older, more established artists, and the rising cost of concert tickets has also sharpened the trend. It’s easier to talk yourself into forking over $100 or more (often a lot more) for a show if you know a dozen songs than if you know one or two, so artists who are a few years removed from their last hit may sell more tickets than a young up-and-comer riding the wave of his or her first or second hit. Also, as an artist ages, their fans do, too. When Swift was 19, most of her fans were teenagers or preteens, and few of them could afford pricey concert tickets unless their parents took them to the show (as my wife did for our older daughter a decade ago). Now, the core of Swift’s fanbase is working adults in their twenties and thirties who can afford the tickets and make an event of it reconnecting with old friends. Add it all up, and Swift is entering her prime as a touring artist while not yet that far removed from her prime as a hitmaker.
Consider, as a parallel, Beyoncé, who is eight years older than Swift. Her peak as a pop-radio artist was winding down by 2010, although to this day she has a base in R&B radio. She continued to be a massively successful touring artist after that, with a major world tour in 2023, and she still sells a boatload of albums to her built-in fanbase. She’s not exactly a has-been, any more than you’d describe Bruce Springsteen or U2 as has-beens, but she’s also not as ubiquitous and popular in her early forties as she was around 2012–13, when she sang the national anthem at the second Obama inauguration and did the Super Bowl halftime show just weeks later.
Third, pent-up demand and the pandemic. Swift launched her “Eras” tour in March 2023. Her last tour ended in November 2018. She had released four studio albums in between tours, so there was a lot of music that hadn’t been experienced live before. The pandemic meant that a lot of her fans had enjoyed few chances to see live shows in the interim. Many of her 20- and 30-something fans were (after five intervening years) more financially stable than they were during the last tour, while teen fans hadn’t been old enough to go last time around. That explains much of the overwhelming, Ticketmaster-crashing, scalper-enriching surplus of demand that made this tour so prominent in the first place. Add to that the fact that the two quiet, contemplative albums that Swift put out in July and December 2020 — while musically fairly uninteresting — met a felt need in her fans during the long lockdown and matched the moods many were feeling.
Fourth, lack of competition. The pop-music landscape has hollowed out to the point where there are far fewer artists left — particularly in Swift’s age range — who have mass pop-culture appeal. That’s a factor of a lot of different causes, including changes to how we consume music and television as well as the overall splintering of mass popular culture. Going back to my own early teens, it would be hard to be as colossally popular and visible as Michael Jackson during the Thriller era or Springsteen during the Born in the U.S.A. era, yet those two eras nearly overlapped; between 1982 and 1987 you also had massive eras for Prince, Madonna, U2, Phil Collins, Lionel Richie, Huey Lewis and the News, Guns N’ Roses, Bon Jovi, and many others including Paul Simon, Dire Straits, Whitney Houston, Def Leppard, and INXS. The music scene was jammed with varied talents in their primes. Beyoncé, for her part, came from the same generation of durable female pop stars as Britney Spears, Kelly Clarkson, Pink, Avril Lavigne, and Christina Aguilera. Swift soaks up so much attention because there aren’t a ton of alternatives.
Fifth, demographics. If Swift gets more press attention than she may entirely deserve, consider that she’s single, white, female, in her early 30s, glib, ambitious, and works with words for a living — in short, a demographic group that overlaps very significantly with the people you’d be most likely to encounter in American TV, print, and web newsrooms. (This is much like the reason why Springsteen is disproportionately popular among Gen X and Boomer sports journalists.)
Sixth, fortuitous events. Ever since she was the innocent bystander to Kanye West’s stage-crashing pro-Beyoncé rant at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2009, Swift has managed to be around other famous people and at the center of controversies that played to her benefit. A fight with her former record label, for example, generated not just sympathy but an audience for re-recorded versions of her earlier albums. Dating Kelce, at a time when his team is making its fourth Super Bowl run in five years, is just the latest example of that. It’s not a conspiracy; it’s just the stars aligning as fate sometimes does for people who have talent and put in the work.