Taylor Swift: Audience and Industries

Audience

Background and audience wider reading

1) What examples of fandom and celebrities are provided in the article?

Lady Gaga’s Little Monsters, Beyoncé’s Bey Hive, Taylor Swift’s Swifties, and Nicki Minaj’s Barbs.

2) Why did Taylor Swift run into trouble with her fanbase? 

When the presale for Taylor Swift’s tour turned into a battle royale for fans locked out of Ticketmaster’s system, frazzled Swifties voiced their disappointment. Ticketmaster and Swift quickly apologized, with the singer calling the process “excruciating”. Ticketmaster ended up testifying in Congress in a hearing about consolidation in the ticketing industry.

3) Do Stan accounts reflect Clay Shirky's ideas regarding the 'end of audience'? How? 

Stan accounts reflect how even though we do get one to many communication, people can go out and create forums for discussion and even collective groups with a shared belief or reverence for a particular artist that then becomes many to many communication and many to one through comment sections, blogs and other forms of media that these 'Stan's' go out and create therefore supporting clay Shirky. 

1) What do Taylor Swift fans spend their money on? 

Taylor Swift fans are known for spending significant amounts of money on albums, merchandise and concert tickets.

2) How does Swift build the connection with her fans? Give examples from the article.

While being a fan is an increasingly expensive experience, there seems to be a particular connection between Taylor’s fandom and the expectation of consumption. 

-Handpicked fans - chosen select few who she meets with before announcing an album

For these events, she memorises facts about each fan in attendance, surprising them with comments about new haircuts, academic achievements and relationship milestones.

3) What have Swifties done to try and get Taylor Swift's attention online? 

individuals often put the date and type of interaction in their bio to broadcast the attention they received to others within the fandom community. being noticed on social media puts you a step closer to meeting Swift in person – something many of the participants in my research into her fandom described as the ultimate motivation behind their engagement. This sets a baseline of what it takes to get their – and Swift’s – attention.

4) Why is fandom described as a 'hierarchy'? 

More realistically, they are hierarchical structures in which fans have their status elevated by participating in certain ways. For Swift fans, these hierarchies are heavily tied to practices of consumption, including the purchasing of concert tickets. Within the fandom, fans who travel to shows, attend multiple nights, or have seats near the stage are labelled “dedicated” and “committed”. Those who miss out on tickets often express their frustration at missing out to others who they don’t deem to be “real” fans.

5) What does the article suggest is Swift's 'business model'? 

Swift’s business model is largely built on fan desire to meet her. How do you meet her? You prove you are the biggest fan – and you’ve made the sacrifices (and spent the money) to show it.

Taylor Swift: audience questions and theories

Work through the following questions to apply media debates and theories to the Taylor Swift CSP. You may want to go back to your previous blogpost or your A3 annotated booklet for examples. 

1) Is Taylor Swift's website and social media constructed to appeal to a particular gender or audience?

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Although it does not seem like T.S is targeting any one specific gender, I believe it can be argued that through the photoshoots on some of the websites pages, an argument for women as a spectacle can be made as even though it could be a sign of strength and empowerment to women, it may in fact reinforce the male gaze for male viewership/fanbase of T.S

2) What opportunities are there for audience interaction in Taylor Swift's online presence and how controlled are these? 

Taylor swift has previously selected members of her fanbase to meet up with and is usually very controlled in the way that it is presented on twitter and Instagram. It is constructed to make T.S look very approachable and relatable to the average person through her interactions with them.

3) How does Taylor Swift's online presence reflect Clay Shirky’s ‘End of Audience’ theories? 

T.S fanbase allows for people to create their own blogs and fan pages that then allows for many to many communication through those channels especially in the comment sections of T.S posts on Instagram and Twitter while fan projects and posts could provide a many to one to show appreciation for T.S

4) What effects might Taylor Swift's online presence have on audiences? Is it designed to influence the audience’s views on social or political issues or is this largely a vehicle to promote Swift's work? 

T.S has not shied away from supporting political movements in the past such as feminism and supporting Kamala Harris in the most recent 2024 US election. This reflects her values and beliefs and can be seen as promoting her work by the amount of publicity she gets for her political stances.

5) Applying Hall’s Reception theory, what might be a preferred and oppositional reading of Taylor Swift's online presence? 

Preferred - 

Oppositional -

Industries

How social media companies make money

1) How many users do the major social media sites boast?

As of Q4 2022, Meta (META), formerly Facebook, had 2.96 billion monthly active users.

Twitter (now X) stopped reporting monthly active users, but the last count in Q1 2019 was 330 million, while LinkedIn had about 900 million monthly active users as of Q1 2023.

2) What is the main way social media sites make money? 

Targeted Advertisements

3) What does ARPU stand for and why is it important for social media companies? 

For social media, the importance of the number of viewers glued to their computer or smartphone screens is every bit as important (if not more so) as it is to commercial television. There’s a reason why Meta’s 10-K filing with the U. S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) uses the acronym ARPU, which means average revenue per user. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. "Form 10-K, Facebook, Inc., For the Fiscal Year Ended December 31, 2020,".

4) Why has Meta spent huge money acquiring other brands like Instagram and WhatsApp? 

Meta's ARPU at the end of 2022 was $39.63. Multiply that by the aforementioned estimated user base for Q4 2022 to get a total revenue approximation, and now you can understand why Meta had a market capitalization of over $1 trillion at its height.

When Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg went looking for a chief operating officer in 2007, it’s no coincidence that he selected not an engineer nor a technologist but a vice president with a background in advertising sales. Sheryl Sandberg had spent 6.5 years selling advertising as a vice president at Google

5) What other methods do social media sites have to generate income e.g. Twitter Blue? 

Advertising isn’t just a way for Meta and other social media companies to perhaps earn a little bit of revenue in between hosting family photos and personal musings. It’s the very purpose of those sites.

However, in recognition of the potential perils of having too much of the company's fortunes tied solely to advertising, Mark Zuckerberg initiated a new corporate strategy at Meta to eventually dominate what has come to be known as the "Metaverse." Whether the strategy will bear fruit for the company

Regulation of social media

1) What suggestions does the report make? Pick out three you think are particularly interesting. 

• limiting the use of micro-targeting advertising messages

• forcing social networks to disclose in the news feed why content has been recommended to a user

• banning the use of so-called dark patterns - user interfaces designed to confuse or frustrate the user, such as making it hard to delete your account

2) Who is Christopher Wylie? 

Among those contributing to the report were Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower Christopher Wylie. Christopher Wylie is a British-Canadian data consultant.

3) What does Wylie say about the debate between media regulation and free speech? 

In most Western democracies, you do have the freedom of speech. But freedom of speech is not an entitlement to reach. You are free to say what you want, within the confines of hate speech, libel law and so on. But you are not entitled to have your voice artificially amplified by technology. These platforms are not neutral environments. Algorithms make decisions about what people see or do not see. Nothing in this report restricts your ability to say what you want. What we're talking about is the platform's function of artificially amplifying false and manipulative information on a wide scale.

4) What is ‘disinformation’ and do you agree that there are things that are objectively true or false? 

There are some objectively disprovable things spreading quite rapidly on Facebook right now. For example, that Covid does not exist and that the vaccine is actually to control the minds of people. These are all things that are manifestly untrue, and you can prove that. Our democratic institutions and public discourse are underpinned by an assumption that we can at least agree on things that are true. Our debates may be about how we respond or what values we apply to a particular problem, but we at least have a common understanding that there are certain things that are manifestly true.

5) Why does Wylie compare Facebook to an oil company? 

An oil company would say: "We do not profit from pollution." Pollution is a by-product - and a harmful by-product. Regardless of whether Facebook profits from hate or not, it is a harmful by-product of the current design and there are social harms that come from this business model.

6) What does it suggest a consequence of regulating the big social networks might be? 

If you have a platform that has the unique selling point of "we will allow you to promote hate speech, we will allow you to deceive and manipulate people", I do not think that business model should be allowed in its current form. Platforms that monetise user engagement have a duty to their users to make at least a minimum effort to prevent clearly identified harms. I think it's ridiculous that there's more safety consideration for creating a toaster in someone's kitchen, than for platforms that have had such a manifest impact on our public health response and democratic institutions.

7) What has Instagram been criticised for?

This is a product of a platform that is making recommendations to you. These algorithms work by picking up what you engage with and then they show you more and more of that. In the report, we talk about a "cooling-off period". You could require algorithms to have a trigger that results in a cooling-off period for a certain type of content. If it has just spent the past week showing you body-building ads, it could then hold off for the next two weeks. If you want to promote body building, you can. But from the user's perspective, they should not be constantly bombarded with a singular theme.

8) Can we apply any of these criticisms or suggestions to Taylor Swift? For example, should Taylor Swift have to explicitly make clear when she is being paid to promote a company or cause? 

I think that it is the artists responsibility to make sure that objectively, a product is know to be a sponsorship or not as many people may take the hegemonic reading of any given tweet or publishing by Taylor Swift and assume that a product is being promoted due to the very carefully constructed nature of the posts, everything is done for a reason and so 'fake news' can spread very fast if one person makes a connection that was not intended by the artist in the first place causing problems.