discussions around Taylor’s billionaire status are very valid to have and there ones I think about often but most people do not come into it with a good faith attitude and just want to use her as a means to exercise their misogyny since she’s an acceptable target. I’m uninterested in discussing with people who refuse to actually see any nuance when discussing her because they’re too lazy to read.
the ethics surrounding her music having the wealth it does and how that could or couldn’t be different than oil billionaires, the musk/bezos/zuckerberg/trump type vs its similarities to jay z and Beyoncé/rihanna, all of whom are billionaires. If someone is to look me dead in the eye and say that Elon musk and Taylor swift are on the same level they’re genuinely insane and don’t actually carry the ethics they think they do.
All that being said: I do agree that billionaires shouldn’t exist because it’s built on the backs of exploited workers (and this is everyone’s only argument against billionaires and not one I disagree with because Yeah!) but I’d want to dissect that more regarding Taylor.
She doesn’t have any separate business ventures in the way the other celebrities listed do, she just has her music and her production company where she makes her music videos from. So that means any workers being exploited and underpaid come from exclusively her music and anything related to her music and how her catalogue reached the value it has.
We know from the eras tour that she pays her direct employees Very well with Very Good benefits and gave life changing bonuses multiple times during the tour as the grosses from the show continued tow grow. Confirmed included her dancers and singers and truck drivers and we can safely assume that includes her band, all the crew members from wardrobe to sound to lighting— anyone directly tied to her tour. All the venues she performed at had union crews as far as we know so they’re getting paid adequately there.
So touring is, as far as we know, good and above industry standard in terms of how money is distributed and workers exploitation. The actual making of her music is her and her collaborators, no need to dig further into that imo.
The other main way that she is marketing her music is through merch. This is primarily where I can see worker exploitation coming in downstream of her and her direct hand on the process. Whoever manufactures her vinyls/cds/cassettes, her merch apparel, all of it- that’s where I think there could be tighter scrutiny. There is a rumor floating around that she doesn’t have control over merch and that her label republic records has control over it, given in exchange for allowing her to own the masters when she signed with them in 2018, post reputation and pre Lover. This is unconfirmed but fans noticed a difference in merch as well as warehouses when she signed on so it could be true, but we’ll probably never know.
If she has control over merch- that’s where the issue could arise. If not, then we’re back to square one.
Taylor wasn’t a billionaire before 2023. This was the eras tour when she reached an entirely new peak of her career. There were a lot of factors involved in the tour being as big as it was, everything from re-recordings to new music to the eras tour basically being a biggest hits+ tour. And then she bought back her masters to the first six albums she made under big machine and that basically doubled her wealth. It’s actually credited that she is the first person to have the majority of her wealth come from her magic and royalties/touring. “Primarily based on her songs and performances” is the exact quote.
So is it unethical for an artist’s catalogue to amass that much wealth? Is it more ethical for a corporation to own her music (again) vs the artist owning their work and having control over it? And how do we tax a billionaire accordingly when it comes from the means hers did? These are all genuine questions, and only the last I don’t have a clear answer to. Maybe a higher tax % against the valuation of an asset once it hits a certain threshold. The higher the more it wacks.
We don’t know what the rest of her wealth looks like. We know she has a few houses. We don’t know about stock portfolios etc. we do know she’s not selling her music, not when she fought for years to get it back and went so far as to re-record her music so she could own it. She still earned royalties from her old music pre-buy back but it was important to actually Own her work. It wasn’t about the money.
I don’t know what the correct answer is to any of this. I also think that with the way the global economy has shifted and with rapid inflation across the globe that single digit billionaires will become more and more common where they wouldn’t have existed in the past and that we need to have a serious look at whether an ethical billionaire can exist or not. I still don’t think there can be one, but that might be changing.
Edit: and the hoarding of wealth as an issue as well and agreed- comes back to how is that addressed while still maintaining ownership of her work cause she shouldn’t sell it, it’s her life’s work and her art.