Is It Time To Trust-Bust Taylor Swift?
The pop singer's new concert film inadvertently makes the case for big businesses with sweeping market power.
Over the weekend, I sat in a movie theater and watched as an elaborately sequined Taylor Swift sang and strutted across a stage made of screens at Los Angeles' SoFi Stadium in a film version of her ongoing Eras Tour. For nearly three hours, Swift performed songs from albums spanning her entire career, which now runs the better part of two decades. And the roughly 70,000 fans in the stadium—some equally sparkly—ate it up, screaming and crying and OMGing and tearfully, joyfully singing along.
In fact, the movie probably represents the efforts of more like 200,000 fans, since it was shot over three nights in August. Swift's tour stop in Los Angeles was even longer, playing for six nights; tickets reportedly cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars and required a Taylor Swift–like level of focus and effort to obtain. Tickets to the movie, which was released following a surprise announcement this summer, were not quite as arduous to acquire, but on opening weekend, screen after screen sold out, instantly making it the highest-grossing concert film of all time.
Swift isn't just a successful pop star. She is arguably the biggest name in all of entertainment right now: She's a blockbuster on the big screen, on the album charts, and in the nation's biggest venues. Indeed, her successes have fed on themselves over the years, transforming her from a child-prodigy songwriter into a smiling, sparkling cultural juggernaut from which there is no escape.
It's impossible to imagine an omnicompetent perfectionist like Swift ever truly missing the mark, but even if she did, the sheer scale of her popularity would seem to prevent real defeat. Taylor Swift is not just too big to fail—she is too beloved, too cherished, too central to the lives and minds of her fans. And the more mental (and economic) space she occupies, the more they love her: Swift's appeal is derived in large part from her mega success. Her record-breaking movie is just the latest sweeping victory for Big Taylor.
As I took in the big-screen spectacle, I had many questions: Where does Swift get her stamina? Why is this movie nearly three hours long? How does one acquire so many sequins?
But mainly what I wondered was: What does Lina Khan think of all this?
Khan, of course, is the current head of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and one of the recent pioneers of the theory of antitrust that argues, essentially, that, when it comes to the economy, big is inherently bad. Since her days as a law student, Khan has led the charge against Amazon, arguing that its enormous size gives it market power that requires a forceful government response. In the widely read, influential 2017 law paper that helped boost her into a career as a federal regulator, she argued that Amazon had hoodwinked customers into using the service by charging prices that were too low. Today, as chair of the FTC, she is charging Amazon with abusing its power by, er, setting prices that are too high.
It doesn't make much sense, really. But in either version of the argument, the core of Khan's theory is that Amazon's dominance over the marketplace—its scale and inescapability in so many different domains—gives it an overwhelming power that it is using, and abusing, to sway customers and shape the structure of the market to give itself an advantage over rivals and competitors.
I am no fan of Khan's aggressive approach to antitrust. But if Amazon is violating antitrust law by using its bigness to increase its size, then why isn't Taylor Swift? Is it time for the FTC to break up Big Taylor? Consider this a modest proposal, in the Swiftian sense.
After all, Swift used her star leverage not only to sell tickets to her own movie but to reshape the rest of the market: After reportedly entering into talks with several Hollywood studios to distribute the film and coming away disappointed, Swift circumvented the usual distribution arrangements and struck a distribution deal directly with the AMC theater chain.
Not only did that deal cut out the middleman, it was extremely favorable to Swift, giving her the majority of box-office revenue from the movie. Studios didn't just lose out on making money from distribution, they also pushed some of their own releases from the release calendar, so as not to compete with the Swift cinematic juggernaut.
Swift, in other words, used her outsized market power to disrupt existing business models, harming competitors while keeping the lion's share of the box-office revenue for herself.
Nor was this the first time Swift's Eras tour tangled with preexisting distribution models: After frustrated Swift fans struggled to obtain concert tickets, Congress held a hearing about Live Nation, which, through Ticketmaster, handled tickets for her tour. Swift fans were leaning on lawmakers to use the power of the legislature, changing the established order to benefit the Swifties of the world.
If Taylor Swift were a tech giant, you might say that Big Taylor rigs the game so that Taylor Swift always wins.
This comparison is admittedly—and intentionally—somewhat ridiculous. But it is also instructive in thinking not only about the general inanity of so many arguments for antitrust but also about the value of scale and the way it provides direct benefits to consumers.
Just as Amazon uses its scale to provide more options for customers, Taylor Swift can deliver more for her fans because she uses her leverage and operates across so many dimensions of the market. She has a natural monopoly on a highly valued asset—the music, persona, and physical incarnation of Taylor Swift—and she has leveraged that value to build an empire. It's a winner-take-all cycle of success, and regulators really ought to be concerned.
Indeed, Swift has built an empire that's popular not in spite of its size but at least partially as a result of it. Much of Swift's appeal lies in her ability to draw so many people together, to unite 70,000 fans in ecstatic reverie. Seeing Swift on stage or on screen is a capital-E Event—not just a night on the town, but a day, a weekend, a lifestyle. Seeing a Swift production, in all its glorious enormity, is a milestone. It's not just that Taylor Swift is popular because she's beloved; Taylor Swift is beloved because she is so popular.
That enormous popularity is another thing Swift shares with Amazon: Earlier this year, a Harvard-Harris poll found that Amazon was the single most popular institution, ahead even of the U.S. military. Notably, Taylor Swift wasn't on the list.
