Taylor Swift on How to Save the Music Industry: Treat It Like a Love Affair

Taylor Swift, everyone’s favorite middle-aged woman trapped in a 24-year-old’s body, made her journalistic debut for the Wall Street Journal on Monday afternoon to share her thoughts about the music industry, which she says still has a lively pulse despite plummeting CD sales and the rise of low-paying digital streaming services, thank you very much.

“In my opinion, the value of an album is, and will continue to be, based on the amount of heart and soul an artist has bled into a body of work, and the financial value that artists (and their labels) place on their music when it goes out into the marketplace,” she writes. “I hope they don’t underestimate themselves or undervalue their art.”

Swift also takes time to point out other changes she sees in the music industry, like the pressure to have a social media following as a new artist (“In the future, artists will get record deals because they have fans—not the other way around”) and the vanishing distinctions between genres (“The only real risk is being too afraid to take a risk at all”).

She comments on the nature of celebrity, too, noting how the spotlight has only gotten more intense and more relentless, but the real crux of her piece is savvy business advice. If you want to sell millions of copies like she has, treat your career like a romantic partner — spice things up now and then to keep things interesting, but don’t go for cheap shock value. She writes:

T-Swift makes some good points throughout the essay, but her final words are a bit of a puzzler: “And I’d also like a nice garden.” Don’t we all, Taylor — don’t we all.

[WSJ]