TAYLOR SWIFT PERFORMS HER ‘ERAS TOUR’
Taylor Swift, whose current “The Eras Tour” is filling stadiums across the U.S., is definitely one of the biggest names in the music industry.
She has won multiple Grammy, MTV, Billboard, People’s Choice, Teen Choice, and Country Music awards. She is famous for writing hits about her personal breakups, and her ability to expose those former partners. With those experiences she has been able to write and sing songs that a lot of people connect with when it comes to those tough times in life.
Swift started in country music. After dropping three albums, her songs shifted to pop. When she released “folklore” and “evermore” in the midst of the COVID pandemic, they were categorized as “alternative.” Her most recent album, “Midnights,” shifted back to the pop genre. She has often crossed the major music genres with 10 albums, in all.
Ten albums are a lot, and she does not even own all of them. When she signed with Big Machine Records at 15 years old, it gave the label ownership to her masters. In 2019 Scooter Braun, a music executive, bought Big Machine Records, giving him ownership of all her original albums. Swift was then offered a deal that if she re-signed with Big Machine she could basically earn each of the albums back, one at a time. She declined the deal and signed with another record label, Republic Records, allowing her to own her own masters of all new albums she recorded, but it did not apply to her past work.
However, this did not stop Swift from wanting to own her past work. In 2021 she dropped re-records of the albums she did not own, starting with ‘Fearless,’ her second album originally released in 2010. She dropped the re-record in April 2021, calling it “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” which contained all the 19 songs on the original album and added six bonus tracks “from the vault” as she calls them.
In November 2021, Swift dropped “Red (Taylor’s Version),” the re-record of her fourth album that originally dropped in 2012. This time she added six ‘vault’ songs, including a 10-minute version of the number “All Too Well,” which had debuted in 2012. That leaves four albums for her to re-record in order to own all of her music.
Midnights dropped last October, immediately breaking streaming records. Within 24 hours, there were 184.6 million streams on Spotify. The previous record was set by Drake in 2021, with 153.4 million streams of his album “Certified Lover Boy.” One of her songs, “Snow on the Beach,” for which she collaborated with Lana Del Rey, broke the Spotify record for single-week streams for an all-female collaboration with 57.5 million streams.
On her current “The Eras Tour,” Swift is performing songs from all her albums, usually for over three hours each show. The show consists of 44 songs total, that are divided into 10 acts. Every time she performs, she performs two surprise songs that will not be performed at any of the other venues, making it a unique performance every time.
She continues to break records while on tour this year: With more than 69,000 people attending her appearance in Glendale, Arizona, she reported broke Madonna’s U.S. record crowd of 63,000 set in 1987. That is crazy!
Some of Swifts’ fans refer to her as “The Music Industry.” I cannot say I disagree. She is an amazing songwriter and performer and after covering multiple music genres, she truly has taken over a huge part of the industry itself. She is a smart businesswoman who knows how to put on a show.
Leave a comment