How Taylor Swift can save the music industry

THE BIG IDEA

With the imminent release of her new album, The Life of a Showgirl, Taylor Swift is poised to become bigger than ever. Meanwhile the music industry is in existential crisis. But can all-conquering Miss Americana do something about it?

Words: David Rea

27 September 2025

Davidwr

Photo: Sam Kovak / Alamy

TAKE A DEEP BREATH. And exhale. There are only six days now until the release of Taylor Swift's new album, The Life of a Showgirl. Immediately after the album’s announcement in August, we were inundated with mind-boggling statistics old and new: Taylor’s last studio album shattered records with one billion streams over the course of five days on Spotify. Her Eras Tour made approximately £1.6 billion in ticket sales. Boyfriend Travis Kelce’s podcast, where Taylor announced the new album, has 23 million views at the time of writing.

The conversation surrounding Taylor Swift often centres around these extraordinary statistics, the landmarks she reaches, the history she rewrites. ‘The most notable records Taylor Swift has broken,’ ran a recent headline in The Week. ’Why is Taylor Swift so big?’ Mark Savage asked on the BBC News website. ‘Is Taylor Swift’s Showgirl era set to propel pop megastar to even greater heights?’ Laura Snapes wondered in The Guardian after news of the album broke.

And she is big. Gigantic, in fact. Like a modern-day Titanic, diamond-studied and glittering, she sails the entertainment seas, crashing the Internet every time she adjusts course. But where is she heading exactly? She might seem unlikely to hit any career-capsizing icebergs, but there will surely come a time when her all-conquering, record-breaking narrative becomes wearisome. If her endless rise doesn't falter, then come her next album cycle there might be so much Taylor-based media distraction people will actually forget to go to work. She’s broken the Internet. Maybe, one day, she could actually crash the world.

Meanwhile, a technological revolution is shaking the music industry’s foundations. Sections of it are in crisis. In 2023, Warner Music signed its first avatar artist, Noonoouri, created via graphics and motion capture. At the beginning of 2024 Apple’s music recognition app, Shazam, published forecasts of who the biggest breakout artists of the year would be. This year, the entirely AI-generated band Velvet Sundown got one million streams on Spotify, and has to date over 380,000 monthly listeners on the platform. Estimates regarding the percentage of music listened to via streaming services, including one made in a 2022 UK Government report, range from 70% to 80%, and these services have been roundly criticised for underpaying artists, leaving those at the grassroots level struggling to survive.

Imagine the future, three decades from now. It is the summer of 2055, and almost 400,000 music fans are simultaneously waiting to be entertained in four of Europe's largest stadiums. They are all premium subscribers to a streaming service, whose parent company owns the rights to the world’s most commercially successful AI-generated pop star, ‘Cool Boy’. Since 2025, AI has completely taken over the music industry. Old school music journalism was quickly snuffed out by AI-generated website proxies, shilling for music corporations. In the absence of independent criticism, these corporations could release music with only their own PR to evaluate it. As listeners’ sensibilities adjusted to the derivative and antiseptic AI slop, becoming narrower and less sophisticated in the process, so the music became more palatable and then desirable.

“These two trajectories — the ongoing commercial growth of Taylor Swift and the collapse of the music industry as we know it — appear to be crossing one another at this very moment, somewhere out there in the pop music landscape: Taylor’s gleaming passenger ship passing the music industry’s half-abandoned island, its foundations collapsing into the sea, flames taking to the air. But Taylor Swift should take note of the splashing waters and fires.”

By 2040, both the music industry and marketplace favoured computer-generated music from computer-generated pop stars. In an ‘always on’ culture in which fans wanted updates, newsletters, photographs, films and new music on an unmanageably regular basis, no one (not even the last human pop superstar Taylor Swift) was able to keep up with the robots. Industry executives understood that, unlike humans, AI didn't get anxiety, depression or burnout; it was never late, never threw a tantrum and always agreed to the promotion schedule.

Cool Boy’s 20-metre tall holographic projection steps on stage, at precisely the same time at Camp Nou in Spain, Wembley Stadium in England, Signal Iduna Park in Germany and Luzhniki Stadium in Russia. The crowd go wild. The first song starts up. It strikes an uncanny balance to some ears, close enough to late 20th century and early 21st century music to be accessible, yet not overly familiar as to be off-putting.

These two trajectories — the ongoing commercial growth of Taylor Swift and the collapse of the music industry as we know it — appear to be crossing one another at this very moment, somewhere out there in the pop music landscape: Taylor’s gleaming passenger ship passing the music industry’s half-abandoned island, its foundations collapsing into the sea, flames taking to the air. But Taylor Swift should take note of the splashing waters and fires. Because what is happening in the music industry ultimately threatens her as well. At the current rate of change, dystopia might arrive far sooner than 2055.

As a sometime disruptor of industry norms, Taylor Swift has the fierce independent spirit and fearlessness to lead change. Her stories have become part of modern pop lore. Swift boycotted Spotify from 2014 until 2017, complaining in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that artists’ royalties were too small. After the masters of her first six albums were sold to Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings in 2019, she began re-recording them as ‘Taylor’s Versions’, having retained the copyright to the lyrics and music. In a similar case, Prince re-recorded his song ‘1999’ in an ongoing battle to regain control over the master recordings of his back catalogue from Warner Bros. But Taylor’s plan to re-record six albums was more ambitious and, to put it mildly, more daring. Would fans really buy the same, or almost the same, six albums again? The fact that the four Taylor’s Versions released to date have gone to number 1 in the Billboard 200 has spoken volumes about Taylor Swift’s fanbase – its size, loyalty and power. Crucially, that fanbase has enabled her to circumvent the industry’s traditional power base: record labels.

Grassroots efforts to fight back against the technological revolution, such as The United Musicians and Allied Workers union’s attempts to force streaming platforms into fairer payment to artists, have so far come to very little. Sadly, such unions appear minuscule beside giant branded celebrities, whose follower counts can exceed the population of several nations. If there is to be radical change, then it is more likely to come from the top down.

“Swift’s hand would be strengthened if she instigated change in tandem with other artists, of course, though any such unanimity seems unlikely on the face of it. Such solidarity, whether it be collectives, communes or unions, tend to be born out of mutual need, usually financial, and instigated by those who are struggling. ”

Could Taylor Swift, with her power, drive and sheer guts, create or co-create a new ethical streaming platform — one which promised to pay artists fairly and be free from AI, thus eliminating two major threats to artists’ survival? The announcement of such a service would well and truly break the Internet. The first big name artists who migrated their music to the new platform would be seen as industry saviours and heroes, burnishing their reputations and brands. The likely subsequent exodus of artists large and small from Spotify and other services would considerably weaken them, choking off much of the competition.

Swift’s hand would be strengthened if she instigated change in tandem with other artists, of course, though any such unanimity seems unlikely on the face of it. Such solidarity, whether it be collectives, communes or unions, tend to be born out of mutual need, usually financial, and instigated by those who are struggling. But then, given the crisis at hand, major artists might soon be approaching that status — if not quite struggling, then at least diminished.

To her advantage, Swift would be able to tap into a deep well of ill feeling towards AI and streaming services. In October 2024, a group of around 13,500, including Thom Yorke of Radiohead, Robert Smith of The Cure, Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus and Billy Bragg, signed a statement criticising companies for the unlicensed use of their work to develop Artificial Intelligence. Since then a week barely goes by without a public figure from pop culture slating AI. Artists’ long-standing antipathy towards Spotify was captured most eloquently all the way back in 2013, when Thom Yorke said on the website Sopitas that it was ‘the last desperate fart of a dying corpse.’ The list of artists who have boycotted the streaming platform, for one reason or another, include Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Graham Nash, Hotline TNT and King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard.

Taylor Swift leading a band of major artists in the launch of an ethical streaming platform! It's a big idea. Enormous, even. But then, as we are repeatedly reminded, Taylor Swift is enormous, enormous enough to realise it. In six days, with the release of her new album, she will probably become even bigger. The jaw-dropping numbers will increase. The strings of zeros will roll across our screens.

But there is an iceberg on the horizon. In the not so distant future, if Taylor Swift wishes to keep breaking records, she needs to make her most audacious move yet, sail her ship into harbour and build a brave new world. Hell, she could even call the new platform Taylor's Version.