Music

Dave Grohl and Taylor Swift might be the smartest people in music

by Tyler Munro

People often look to Dave Grohl for his opinions on the music industry, and that’s fair. With Nirvana, he slid himself into music’s next best thing just before they blew up and managed to transfer that success to a solid, savvy multi-decade career. With nary a dud to his name—Probot aside—he’s managed to adapt to a constantly changing landscape, helping Foo Fighters, Them Crooked Vultures and even Queens of the Stone Age pack arenas along the way.

But for every Deadmau5 collaboration and cool dad documentary series, there’s a moment like his holier-than-thou acceptance speech at the 2012 Grammys, where he put recording to tape on a pedestal, essentially ignoring the merits and cost-effectiveness of digital recordings while neglecting to mention the sheer scope of the “garage” he recorded in.

He’s often right, but not always. But when a successful crowdfunding campaign in his home state of Virginia effectively forced the Foo Fighters to schedule a show in Richmond, Grohl took note.

In essence: Crowdfunding’s sense of supply-and-demand could be the future of music. He’s not wrong. Proving that is… Taylor Swift. Because while the uninitiated might reduce her unspeakably flowery image as little more than the means to peddle hook-heavy country pop, the reality is she’s a 24-year-old superstar with nearly ten years of experience and one hell of a head on her shoulders. Written special to the Wall Street Journal, her new essay not only corroborates Grohl’s theory, it proves it. Better still, it does it in context of the market’s key demographic.

With numerous well written points, Swift’s thesis is best emphasized by her theories on an artist’s relationship with his or her fans.

For Swift, it all started on MySpace. After drawing a parallel to the film industry with an anecdote about casting directors taking Twitter followers into consideration, Swift remembers her first major label meetings and how she explained she’d been communicating with fans on the now dead—sorry, J-Timbs—social network.

And that’s something she absolutely believes, which is why with more than 26 million albums sold worldwide, music’s biggest money maker (she made more than $39 million in 2013) can still be found commenting on her fans’ Instagram pages like the absolute gem she is.

That rapport is important: It takes seconds for Swift to compliment a fan or help them with their self-esteem. By simply acting like an actual, real life human, Swift can effectively guarantee a fan for life by doing what smartphones were made for—using Instagram on the toilet.

Her full essay, which also touches on celebrity culture, genre obfuscation and “arrows through the heart” is a great read. Check it out, in full, at the WSJ.