Cities are readying for the Swift era

The Future. A Taylor Swift tour guarantees a massive economic windfall for the cities she’s playing in, meaning that local businesses must prep for the highest demand they’ll likely see all year. When it comes to superstars like Swift, don’t be surprised if cities start vying to become concert hosts like countries do for the Olympics.

Swift City
Everyone’s excited that Taylor is coming to town.

• Glendale, Arizona (which just hosted the Super Bowl), renamed itself to Swift City last Friday and Saturday to kick off Taylor’s Eras tour.
• An additional 150,000 people are estimated to have headed into the city (which has a population of 250,000) to see the shows.

That’s no surprise when Swift’s tour broke Ticketmaster’s single-day sale record, with over two million tickets scooped up in 24 hours.

The Swift Special
Glendale… er… Swift City Mayor Jerry Weiers said, “One of my jobs is to promote my city by being a cheerleader. […] And it shows that we’re serious about our sports and entertainment district, while having fun at the same time.”

The massive influx of people has restaurants and hotels gearing up for demand — creating satellite sites to accommodate more people, hiring extra staff, and stocking up on ingredients. To get a sense of the demand, the Holiday Inn Glendale completely sold out of rooms on the day the tour was announced.

The Grammys came full circle this year

The Future. Iconoclastic artists who were shut out of music’s biggest night in the past took the stage at Sunday’s award show, proving time doesn’t just heal all wounds; it also allows change to occur at a foundational level. If the Grammys wants to stay relevant and properly honor the music of the moment, it might embrace newness and nonconformity rather than turn a deaf ear to it.

That was then

The artists who rebelled against their elders in the past became the elders of the present at the 2023 Grammys, according to the NYT.

• Several hip-hop artists (including Salt-N-Pepa and DJ Jazzy Jeff), who boycotted the 1989 show because their category wasn’t being televised despite launching that year, appeared at this year’s event.
• Madonna, who became a superstar in the 1980s, has never won any of the major categories. Still, she remains an enthusiastic participant in the show.
• Jay-Z, who boycotted the Grammys in 1999 but has attended in the years since (mainly to support his wife Beyoncé), closed out this year’s ceremony with a DJ Khaled-orchestrated number.

This is now

Iconoclasts became the establishment this year, per the NYT.

• Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican rapper-singer whose album Un Verano Sin Ti was 2022’s most streamed LP, opened the Grammys. Un Verano Sin Ti was also the first Spanish-language album nominated for album of the year.
• Sam Smith and Kim Petras became the first nonbinary and transgender artists, respectively, to top the charts when their track “Unholy” hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in October 2022. Their collaboration also won the best pop duo/group performance this year.

Beyoncé is in a class of her own

While Queen B didn’t perform at this year’s event and hadn’t for some time (a choice that feels deliberate, according to the NYT), she became the most awarded artist in Grammys history this year — and still held on to her rebel cred.

As the Grammys become more open-minded, there might be less of a need to rebel, though. Will what was once considered “mainstream” eventually become “iconoclastic” (and vice versa)? The circle never ends…

Christmas music lifts the shopping spirit

The Future. The holiday season is a key time for retailers, and little else gets people in the shopping mood like a Christmas playlist that appeals to customers of any age. It’s also big business for the companies that make those playlists and the artists who populate them (there’s a reason Mariah Carey is on the charts every December), which shows that the service of creating the right vibe is a craft unto itself.

Christmas curation
Putting together a Christmas playlist that speaks to shoppers is a holiday art.

• Radhika Giri, SVP of emerging business at SiriusXM, told Bloomberg that the request for holiday playlists had increased exponentially during her 12 years at the company… and so has the desire to get those playlists in the rotation sooner.
• Playlist-making for stores is a good business for SiriusXM, which has teams dedicated to their creation, which includes “business experts and musicologists.”
• The company even acquired Cloud Cover Media earlier this year, which specialized in curating music for national brands like Party City and McDonald’s.

The big reason why this work is outsourced to companies like SiriusXM is that no retailer wants to put time and energy into navigating music-licensing agreements.

Everything I Want for Christmas
The goal of these playlists for retailers is to “strike a perfect mood for customers” — a strategy that can actually increase sales. The trick is putting together a tracklist that works across generations.

• Elizabeth Margulis, a music professor at Princeton University and director of the Music Cognition Lab, says retailers need to lean into the “reminiscence bump.”
• What’s that? “The phenomenon that the music people listen to in their teenage years is the music that they remember the best, and often like the most.”
• That’s why music from decades past gets played so often. And since the reminiscence bump can get passed down, so does the love of certain songs.
• Margulis says you can’t go wrong with music from the ‘70s and ‘80s in order to hit multiple generations.

Dave Wasby, VP of music for business at SiriusXM, says that reality drives playlist curation at the company, which is why Bing Crosby is still in rotation. “Whatever decade we were teenagers in, that’s our preference. And that’s true even if you’re 80 years old.”

Demand for Taylor Swift tickets rattles Ticketmaster

The Future. Ticketmaster’s sale of Taylor Swift’s “The Eras Tour” may go down as one of the most chaotic offerings in music history, with demand far exceeding any tour in the company’s history. The dust is still settling on how Ticketmaster will handle the remaining tickets (if there are any), but one thing may be certain — Taylor Swift is the biggest act in the world right now, bar none.

Too big to succeed
Ticketmaster learned this week that there is such a thing as too much of a good thing, according to Insider.

• Ticketmaster leveraged its “Verified Fan” program to sell Taylor Swift tickets — a record 3.5 million people signed up.
• So when the sale started, 1.5 million people were immediately let in while the other 2 million were put on a waiting list.
• The trouble is that 14 million people (and bots) showed up to buy tickets, forcing millions of fans to wait hours to get a shot at getting a ticket.
• Ticketmaster’s site couldn’t handle that kind of traffic. Live Nation chairman Greg Maffei said the tour resulted in “3.5 billion total system requests — 4x our previous peak.”

To fulfill all the demand, Maffei said Swift would need to perform over 900 stadium shows (almost 20x the number of shows she is doing)… that’s a stadium show every single night for the next 2.5 years.”

Ultimately, two million tickets were sold that day.

Stadium-sized stakes
Some lawmakers and government officials want to pull the plug on Ticketmaster’s dominance in the live-music industry.

• Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Senator David Cicilline (D-RI), and others have either criticized Live Nation’s dominance or called for its breakup over antitrust concerns.
• Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti announced that he’s perform over 900 stadium shows in relation to Live Nation’s market share.

And with the actual public sale of Swift tickets that were supposed to take place today being scrapped because of “extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems” and “insufficient remaining ticket inventory,” don’t expect the volume on this to go down anytime soon.

Libraries curate local music streaming services

The Future. Over a dozen public libraries across the US and Canada are offering their own curated music-streaming services that members can access. With many major cities creating unique platforms, artists are gladly signing up for a little more exposure. In an industry awash with too many musicians, libraries may be pivotal in creating local stars.

The Dewey Decibel System
Forget Spotify playlists. Curated library streamers may be the new jam.

• According to Vice, public libraries are creating curated streaming services using an open-source software called MUSICat, which was developed by a startup called Rabble.
• MUSICat allows the libraries to be “region-specific” so that it’s available exclusively for patrons and non-exclusive, so that they can still be shared on other streamers.

The services aim to highlight local artists and genres to the community while putting a little money in their pockets — typically just a few hundred dollars — as a symbolic gesture that artists should be supported.

Soundscape
Libraries in cities like Nashville, Pittsburgh, and Forth Worth have all created their own services — each with unique eligibility rules.

• The New Orleans Public Library’s Crescent City Sounds streamer — which was cursed by “local artists and business owners, music journalists and historians and more” — only accepted artists that regularly gigged in the area.
• The Edmonton Public Library in Alberta, Canada, has already signed up 200 local artists. It has even given some the opportunity to press their music on vinyl or play at library events in the city.

It looks like more and more libraries are okay with getting loud.

And the brand plays on

The Future. For musicians at every level, merch now plays a key role in how they make a living. Unless they’re mainstream pop stars, artists earn more on their merchandise than they do from a record. This truth rang loudest during the pandemic when income streams from live shows disappeared. Unlike other parts of the music business, merch might just be “future-proofed.”

$3.5 billion in global retail sales

It pays to have a fashion-forward audience, according to The Guardian.

• Artists can leverage their following into profitable merch sales on their websites, where they don’t have to pay hefty commission fees to venues that might demand as much as 25% of their sales.
• While a band T-shirt might be perceived as a one-time sale, it delivers value long after the tour has ended.
• Luxury brands like Balenciaga, Louis Vuitton, and Acne have featured big-ticket versions of band tees on their catwalks.
• Retail chains like Primark and Urban Outfitters sell vintage T-shirts to Zoomers who might like the band’s logo more than their music.

Fans want it
Artists have product validation before they invest time and money into designing merch. A tour announcement warms up its audience, creates desire, and teases its product. Merch from certain artists can often sell at higher prices on resale sites than they retail for — like the sweatshirt from Kids See Ghosts, which was marked up 533%.

Audience vs. community
The most successful artists are multi-hyphenates who produce merch not just for the people who see their shows — but also for those who have a conversation with them and fellow fans. For her album Renaissance, Beyoncé made a special edition box with a CD and T-shirt featuring Queen B in one of multiple poses available to pre-order.

“Part of the fun of getting the box was the mystery behind what it would be and what pose I would get,” says Ineye Komonibo, a culture critic at Refinery29. “My friends and I organized so that none of us would get the same pose and even had theories about what each pose or box would be.”

As an evergreen product or a timed release, merch offers the best of both worlds. Vintage or contemporary, it’s always profitable too.