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Disney’s Taylor Swift Era

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Re: Disney’s Taylor Swift Era

#51

Post by Spivak »

BSEdlMMldESB wrote: post #25

> Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for. the rarity is not the source of the value, but an amplifier for the value in a market driven society > It’s my opinion that music should not be free, and my prediction is that individual artists and their labels will someday decide what an album’s price point is. I hope they don’t underestimate them…

> does she understand privilege? she's a music slaver, she's advocating that music remain a limited experience accessible for a few

She's advocating that artists get paid for their work and not sell themselves short. Whatever means our society permits that allows artists to capture the value of their work should be taken. If you want music to be "open access" and effectively patronage that's fine but it doesn't change her point.

We're in a golden era right now where the art itself is so cheap it might as well be free and paid for by scarce goods sold to fans who can afford them. If you squint it's almost pay-what-you-want. My $10/mo Spotify subscription cost me $0.00002/hr last year.

Re: Disney’s Taylor Swift Era

#52

Post by b8d_0 »

BSEdlMMldESB wrote: post #25

> Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for. the rarity is not the source of the value, but an amplifier for the value in a market driven society > It’s my opinion that music should not be free, and my prediction is that individual artists and their labels will someday decide what an album’s price point is. I hope they don’t underestimate them…

>It’s my opinion that music should not be free

Music is only ever free when it's forbidden. It's one of them paradox thingies.

Sad to see generations grow up on music being a spectator sport and not a communal, participatory activity.

Re: Disney’s Taylor Swift Era

#53

Post by alexpotato »

duxup wrote: post #41
alexpotato wrote: post #19

I remember reading the following quote about music in the 1950s and 60s: "Prior to this era, there was no distinction between music adults and teenagers listened to. E.g. Frank Sinatra was popular with multiple age demographics. Starting in the late 1950s, being a cool teenager meant that you liked music that was different than what your parents listened to. This was first seen with rock and roll." It's interesting t…

I certainly saw the claimed fracturing of music along various demographic lines but I always wondered how true it was. It certainly felt that way and it was talked about... but people I knew always listened to a variety of music. The running joke on Youtube about something like Wilson Philips "Hold on" was that "Somewhere out there there's is rocking out to this song". I don't doubt there were differences among demog…

> I honestly didn't even know who Taylor Swift was for an embarrassingly long time and I yet enjoyed her songs when I heard them

The below article (from 2014) has a great perspective on how popular TS was not just in the US but also globally and how rare this was (and still is):

https://priceonomics.com/some-artists-are-big-in-america-som...

Re: Disney’s Taylor Swift Era

#54

Post by areoform »

The solution is obvious, Disney should do more, take real risks and swing for the fences again. Because there's no reason not to.

And what they should do more of isn't legacy content in a new medium — i.e. putting those same TV and movies online instead of cable, but new content that hasn't been completely explored yet.

I didn't start playing video games until recently, but it is obvious that is where the puck is going to be. For example, GTA V has made $8.3B since its launch in 2013. https://www.tweaktown.com/news/91612/grand-theft-auto-franch...

And the shooting video game CSGO has players spending $100M/mo on "cases," https://www.dexerto.com/csgo/players-reportedly-spent-100-mi...

A title with even broader appeal, League of Legends, seems to have roughly 180M MAUs (2023, https://riftfeed.gg/more/player-count-league-of-legends) and $1.75B in revenue in 2020. https://www.esportsbets.com/news/riot-games-revenue-2020/

For comparison, Disney+ had 157M subscribers worldwide (and ~$8B in revenue https://www.demandsage.com/disney-users/)

The above games don't seem to be games anymore — at least, not in the Kerbal Space Program sense, my only frame of reference. They're content distribution systems with players consuming content in bite-sized doses as they play. Their active user bases are larger than what Disney's, and arguably more engaged.

These titles are usually quite violent and based on new IP. With their coffers and IP library, Disney could easily make something better that offers more compelling experiences with modern technology.

Disney Research has been chugging along on doing "story telling" with the help of ML for quite some time now, https://studios.disneyresearch.com/projects/ , with recent advances, they could conceivably arrive at interactive storytelling experiences that allows every child (and adult) to be inside the fantasy universe of, say, Beauty & The Beast and play out a meaningful role in that universe.

If the current modes of content and content delivery don't work, why shouldn't they try something like this at a larger/more serious scale?

If anyone can turn games into a mainstream content delivery platform, it's Disney. And by owning the means of distribution, they can go back to adding more arrows to Walt Disney's diagram.

Re: Disney’s Taylor Swift Era

#55

Post by jsnell »

badosu wrote: post #45
racl101 wrote: post #8

I still could not accurately identify one of her songs by audio if my life depended on it OR if someone offered me $100 million I'd definitely lose out on that money. Yet, she is the biggest popstar on the planet. It's weird, somehow she is everywhere in image and presence but the art she produces eludes me. On the other hand, there are catchy songs like the Benny Hill theme that I know by heart, yet I could not name…

I don't understand why you're being downvoted, I share the same sentiment. I don't know a single Taylor Swift song and I couldn't for my life know for sure a song from her, I'd probably be thinking of her or Katy Perry.

I think it's being downvoted for the "Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn't Own A Television" energy of it, basically a combination of being an irrelevant tangent to the actual topic and boasting about ignorance of pop culture.

Re: Disney’s Taylor Swift Era

#56

Post by taylodl »

racl101 wrote: post #8

I still could not accurately identify one of her songs by audio if my life depended on it OR if someone offered me $100 million I'd definitely lose out on that money. Yet, she is the biggest popstar on the planet. It's weird, somehow she is everywhere in image and presence but the art she produces eludes me. On the other hand, there are catchy songs like the Benny Hill theme that I know by heart, yet I could not name…

Her music isn't that hard to identify, even if you don't listen to it. It has a country-folk song structure, and a simple rhyme scheme. Listen to a few songs and you'll see what I mean.

Meanwhile, I'm coming from the other side - I'm a musician and I've been wondering why is it I don't care much for the music of the biggest pop star on the planet? Usually when it comes to the "pop tarts" as I call them, they have something I like.

Not so with Taylor Swift.

I've listened to all her top hits. I've tried using AI to find songs I might like based off of other music I like. I've basically come up empty-handed. If there's a song where the music is interesting, it's ruined with her vocals or her simplistic rhyme schemes (I really find her rhyme schemes super annoying!).

The most interesting song she has is Shake It Off. The use of a saxophone in modern pop music is welcome and I find the repetition in lyrics better than her usual rhyme schemes. No surprise it was co-written by Max Martin.

Re: Disney’s Taylor Swift Era

#57

Post by fullshark »

dj_gitmo wrote: post #11

> I had friends who went to the first show, and I think she played 45 songs — it was 3+ hours ... She’s sold out 6 straight shows here in Los Angeles I'm surprised it is physically possible to sing for 3 hours, 6 nights in a row.

I saw Taylor Swift play years ago, it was an incredibly impressive show, choreographed down to the minute I'm guessing, even her crowd banter was seemingly predetermined. She's a professional through and through it seems, and I guess she's figured out how to make it work without destroying her vocal chords.

Re: Disney’s Taylor Swift Era

#58

Post by rayiner »

jsnell wrote: post #55
badosu wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why you're being downvoted, I share the same sentiment. I don't know a single Taylor Swift song and I couldn't for my life know for sure a song from her, I'd probably be thinking of her or Katy Perry.

I think it's being downvoted for the "Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn't Own A Television" energy of it, basically a combination of being an irrelevant tangent to the actual topic and boasting about ignorance of pop culture.

The only person I know who couldn’t recognize a Taylor Swift song is my dad, who is a 70-year old Bangladeshi man who listens to American country and Bangladeshi village music on YouTube.

Re: Disney’s Taylor Swift Era

#59

Post by whinenot »

spiderice wrote: post #26
dj_gitmo wrote: post #11

> I had friends who went to the first show, and I think she played 45 songs — it was 3+ hours ... She’s sold out 6 straight shows here in Los Angeles I'm surprised it is physically possible to sing for 3 hours, 6 nights in a row.

I wonder if it is partially lip syncing. Apparently when Celine Dion was performing nightly in Vegas she mixed lip syncing in to her performances to give her voice a break. (I don’t have a source on that, just something I remember hearing years and years ago)

Enrique Iglesias was called out by Howard Stern for crappy vocals in his concert 23 years ago (good lord!).[0] Enrique explained that they overdubbed some of his songs so much in concert that you couldn't tell he was deliberately singing off key, that is until someone gave Howard Stern a copy of the mic feed.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98UWTDFaEYo

Re: Disney’s Taylor Swift Era

#60

Post by kibwen »

Shrezzing wrote: post #18

> Taylor Swift doesn’t understand supply and demand: I think that's a poor reading of Swift & her team. They've clearly got a rock-solid understanding of supply & demand, and other economic concepts, to the extent that their behaviour subverts textbook economic thinking. Spotify acts like a textbook perfectly competitive marketplace: all actors have perfect information, there are no monopolies, the market price for a…

> Taylor Swift doesn’t understand supply and demand

I interpreted this as a criticism of Swift's attempt to generalize her experience to the rest of the artists in the industry.

As you say, Swift and her marketing team have a solid understanding of what her fans will accept. However, to have her say that her tactics are applicable to musicians who don't have anywhere near her sort of following comes across as tone-deaf (heh) at best, and disingenuous at worst.

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