There’s always an aviation angle.
For most folks, Taylor Swift is either a pop star of marginal interest, or a cultural icon, or simply a musician and songwriter to appreciate. The fact she flies often on a Dassault Falcon either means little, or perhaps paints her with an elitist brush.
To aviators, the Easter egg in her latest album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” is that the recording couldn’t exist without her ability to leverage private aviation.
In a clip posted early on the morning of October 3 with the album’s release, Swift recalled saying to her producers, in the midst of the European portion of The Eras Tour: “Do you guys want to do this? I’ll come to you; I’ll make this easy.”
The Swedish producers Max Martin and Shellrock were just a quick leg at FL3X0 away… the pair had collaborated with Swift on three of her previous albums, the glittering and jeweled halls of Red (2012), 1989 (2014), and Reputation (2017).
“It fueled me for the European leg of the tour… getting done with a show, hopping on a plane, and going and writing new songs,” said Swift in the clip.
As an entrepreneur, Swift is an excellent case study, because though her business application (global superstar musician) may not be available to most of us, the lessons she has learned and demonstrated can teach us a lot, especially those of us who work in creative fields.
One that strikes me—a goal that she has successfully obtained earlier this year—is to own your work. I will give you one good reason to listen to her appearance on the New Heights podcast (hosted by her soon to be brother-in-law Jason Kelce and future hubs Travis Kelce) in which she revealed #TS12, her twelfth album—she discusses in detail (starting at 25:15 so you can go right to it) her acquisition of her masters from her first six albums, which she purchased in May. Somewhere before the “folklore” and “evermore” albums of the Covid era, I posit that she fully grasped the raw deal she’d been handed via the recording contract she signed at a tender age.
I didn’t realize (naively) how little most musical artists “own” of their creative product. But I suppose it’s like my having been employed by various aviation publications throughout my life. Little of what you’ve read of my work has actually been produced under my sole ownership.
(Except this is. And it feels awesome. Every time.)
Swift vowed to make it right, and invest in herself and her brand, so buy those masters back she did, from Shamrock Capital, to the tune of $360 million. All of those Eras Tour tickets funded the investment. Now she owns not only the master recordings, but the associated album art with them, among other assets. Bravo!
As for her carbon footprint in the sky, like many responsible corporate and private aviation operators, Swift reports that she purchases “double” what her impact would be, through offsets.
Keeping flying, Tay!
Re ownership of work: exceedingly few artists own their own work.
It’s like asking if a space shuttle pilot owned a piece of the space shuttle just because they were the chief pilot for close to a decade and invented various maneuvers and wrote the standard operating procedures and manuals for that spacecraft. Nope still not theirs.
We all work for someone.
Interesting take, but I must say many artists (my mom included) own their work. And as a pilot I can say that flying an airplane (or the space shuttle) is not the same as the creative output of aristic expression.
More abstractly, I’d agree we all work for some-thing… not necessarily some-one.