An Open Letter to Taylor Swift

Dear Taylor Swift,

Please forgive this letter from a total stranger.  So many people must be calling you up for favors and asking for your time, as Joni Mitchell once sang about so persuasively.

I’m one of those people. I am going to ask a favor.

But not for me. I’m asking you to do a favor for the music. 

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I’m pretty sure you don’t know me. I’m almost as old as your father—not quite, but he and I are part of the same generation. I’ve devoted my life to music, but mostly jazz, a niche field with niche concerns, but where I get to spend time with other people who deeply love music. In my own small way, I’ve tried to be an honest broker, working to earn trust and promote a fair and healthy music ecosystem.

That’s the one thing we have most in common. We both love the music.

We want to see it flourish—not just for ourselves, but for other, better reasons. We want see it flourish for the good of all musicians. And for the benefit of the fans. And for our communities. And, most of all, for the future. 

More than anybody, you have the power to make this happen. You are the right person to create the change we need, and now is the right time.

And we so desperately need help:

• For the first time in 500 years, an increasing number of people listen to music, and don’t even know the name of the artist or the song. This is not by chance, but is an intentional move driven by powerful interests—with the goal of shifting control from artists who create to technocrats who merely aggregate.

• The streaming platforms prefer a situation where fan loyalty is to their app, not the musician. And they don’t care if this turns music into something bland, interchangeable, and generic—because their power is enhanced, and that is their highest priority.

• Musicians only make pennies on new albums—or fractions of a penny—where previously they made dollars. Middlemen flourish (more than ever before!) while creative artists suffer.

• Composers are also losing their income streams in the face of endless lawsuits, publishing catalog buyouts, and inroads from AI. Hundreds of well-funded businesses are pursuing multiple plans to disempower them, or make them totally irrelevant.

• Live music is in even worse shape—venues have never fully recovered from the pandemic. I know so many outstanding musicians who are making less for gigs, unadjusted for inflation, than they were decades ago.

• The major record labels don’t care. They have lost the ability or interest (or both) to launch and nurture new artists. They would rather buy up the rights to old songs than create new ones. Their obsession with the past is scary.

• Indie radio, music media, and other traditional supports of music culture are also in irreversible decline.

Everything feels broken everywhere, all at once.

These are huge challenges. Never before in modern memory has the music ecosystem been so damaged, so stagnant, so exploited by outsiders.

Who can we turn to? Who will fix this?

The streaming platforms will not help us.

They have proven again and again that they don’t love the music, just the cash. It’s not just a question of how poorly they pay musicians—it’s also the other moves they’ve taken to kill fan loyalty, boost generic AI-driven sounds, manipulate listeners, and make music less exciting and independent.

The record labels will not help us.

I don’t trust them, and you probably don’t either. They should be allies of musicians and music lovers. But they decided to align themselves with the streamers instead. That’s a foolish move, because the streamers are natural enemies of labels. Their partnership will have an unhappy ending. But, in the meantime, musicians and fans pay the price for this unholy alliance.

Silicon Valley and other technocrats won’t help us.

They suck cash out of the music economy, and use it to support other projects. Apple would give music away for free if it would sell more devices. Spotify uses its music-driven cash flow to invest in podcasts and audiobooks and all sorts of non-music ventures. It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that ten thousand musicians live on peanuts so Spotify can cut a deal with Joe Rogan.

Radio won’t help us.

Radio stations are dying, and those that survive are almost all corporatized, streamlined, and formula-driven in a way we’ve never seen before in the history of broadcasting.

Newspapers and media outlets won’t help us.

They are downsizing and disappearing. Local coverage of music is almost non-existent now in most cities, and even national coverage of established stars is in a tailspin. It doesn’t help that almost every well-known media brand in music and entertainment is owned by one company. (Go read the bios of the people in charge, and tell me how much you trust them to create a healthy music culture.)

The unions won’t help us.

Hollywood unions are much more powerful than musician unions. For various reasons, musicians have never been very good at collective bargaining. Hence traditional tactics of labor organization are unlikely to reverse the poisonous trends outlined above.

The government won’t help us.

Whenever they pass legislation about music it’s designed to help the corporations. For many years, Disney and other entertainment companies exerted the most influence on these laws. More recently Google, Apple, and other tech companies have shaped legislation. But musicians and music lovers have never had a say in these things.

So who will help us?

Taylor Swift will help us.

Musicians have to help themselves. And they can do it—if they have the right leader. At this moment of crisis, you are that person.

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I don’t say this flippantly. And it’s not just because you’re the most popular musician on the planet.

You have also shown your willingness to take on the system. Even better, you have gone to battle against power brokers in the music business—and have won!

Taylor Swift (photo by Eve Rinaldi)

And that’s just a start. You’re also proving that live music not only can survive, but actually flourish in the digital age. Other superstars have taken the easy way out—playing shows for high rollers in Las Vegas or setting up shop on Broadway for tourists and elites.

But you didn’t do that, Taylor Swift. You’re bringing live music everywhere, creating the most popular music tour in history. The numbers blow my mind. You’re taking your music to five continents, showing people in a hundred cities that a concert can be the biggest entertainment event of the year.

Your total tour revenues are more than the GDP of most nations. In Singapore alone, more people tried to buy concert tickets than the entire population of the country. In the US, 2.4 million people purchased tickets the first day they went on sale—that’s never happened before.

By the time your tour ends, you will have generated more demand for live music than any artist in history—with huge beneficial effects for everybody. When you show up in town, it gives a Super Bowl-sized boost to the entire local economy.

Taylor Swift in Minneapolis (photo by Michael Hicks)

Along the way, you have made so many other contributions to the music ecosystem. You treat everyone generously—paying out $50 million in bonuses to your team. Even truck drivers got $100,000 bonuses. You’ve also made donations to food banks, employed locals, and have even purchased carbon credits at twice the level of the emissions of your tour.

You also revitalized physical music media by convincing a million or so fans to buy their first vinyl album—boosting demand for LPs to levels not seen since the last century. You’ve actually done more to help record stores than the record business.

Nobody else is doing these kinds of things with such impact. It’s not even close.

So I feel that destiny has blessed us.

For the first time in ages, the superstar musician at the top of the hierarchy is brave, independent, generous, and willing to challenge the system. You stand up for artist rights. You stand up for live music. You stand up for people. And you do all this with a grass roots power base that nobody can match—no politician, no billionaire technocrat, and certainly no other performer.

Musicians have never had that kind of visionary leader.

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But it has happened elsewhere. And we can learn from this.

Back in 1919, the four most powerful creative visionaries in Hollywood decided to unite the artists. That was even the name they gave their business: United Artists.

United Artists, 1919

The people behind it were not business executives. They weren’t investors or financiers. The four people who founded United Artists were the three most popular movie stars in Hollywood (Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks) and the most famous director (D.W. Griffith).

They proved that artists can control their own destiny.

Of course, that battle is never over. Even now, creative people are on strike Hollywood—they are demanding a fair and honest system. I think they will prevail. There’s a long history in Hollywood of artists uniting to confront the powerful.

But that’s rarely happened in music.

We have had some attempts. The Beatles launched Apple Records, but they couldn’t even solve their own differences—so they never had the impact on the music ecosystem they might have had. In more recent years, TIDAL seemed like it could be the answer, but the same musicians who launched it eventually made their peace with the existing power structure, and never achieved the transformative change they might have created.

You can be that change, Taylor Swift.

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I’m asking you to launch a business—or let’s call it a cooperative, because I think you will want to have other artists participating as stakeholders.

I won’t try to spell out all of the details here. (But I’ve shared some suggestions in other places.) I suspect that you already have many ideas of your own about this. And we both know a few trustworthy people who can contribute their own expertise.

But the larger picture is crystal clear. We need—and deserve—a trusted organization that nurtures the musical culture, enlists the participation of the best creative artists of our time, and has direct distribution to the fans. Instead of rewarding middleman, it will reallocate cash to showcase and support artistry. The music will come first—instead of last.

If it were necessary, I’m confident that you could raise enough money to buy out Spotify or a big record label or a ticketing company. Or all three. Maybe that’s an option, but you don’t need to do that.

You can create something better from scratch. You can bring together all of the best things about music into a single operation owned by musicians and run by people who love music—encompassing streaming, physical albums, and live music.

You can create a unifying vision. You can build something that’s fair and transparent and gets people excited about music again.

Others will join you. And it can happen quickly:

• Dozens of superstars will follow your lead—because you’ve proven that you can take on the system.

• Lesser known artists will also join you, you just need to make it easy for them to participate.

• Even some record labels may decide it’s better to work with you and other musicians, rather than partner with the ruling technocrats.

• And, of course, the fans will join you too. Tens of millions of them, maybe hundreds of millions. They love you and trust you, and will ensure the success of your initiative.

Taylor Swift, you are the one person who can make this happen. I believe this is your destiny.

Don’t let us down.

With warmest regards,

Ted Gioia
The Honest Broker