Time Names Taylor Swift Person of the Year

[Anderton]

First of all, I think that's a great choice. But I also can't help but think that someone smart at Time saw that this would be a REALLY good way to sell lots of magazines, especially by putting out three different covers. 

 

It's a perfect storm of news, marketing, sales, and trendiness 

 

[KenElevenShadows]

She influences or affects so many things. It's a good choice. She's seriously moved the needle in so many ways for the past year.

[Jeff Leites]

Given that the "person" of the year recognition is suppose to represent the person, or thing (in 1982 it was the personal computer) that had the most influence on the news during the year, I believe that this recognition should have gone to Hamas.  Note that the recognition is NOT always for an heroic or otherwise good person, after all, in 1938, the person of the year was Hitler, probably the most evil person of the 20th century.   Taylor Swift?  Are you kidding me? 🤣 🙄

[KenElevenShadows]

I do know that the person doesn't necessarily have to be a good person. But this year, I'd say it is. And given how she's been so influential in so many ways, I feel she's a great choice. You couldn't help but hear about her all the time, and that's so much because she's been so inspiring to people in so many different ways. That's not difficult to understand at all. 

 

Quote

“No one else on the planet today can move so many people so well. Achieving this feat is something we often chalk up to the alignments of planets and fates, but giving too much credit to the stars ignores her skill and her power.” - Time Magazine

 

Also, I'd like to point out that Hamas is not a person.

[Jeff Leites]

41 minutes ago, KenElevenShadows said:

I do know that the person doesn't necessarily have to be a good person. But this year, I'd say it is. And given how she's been so influential in so many ways, I feel she's a great choice. You couldn't help but hear about her all the time, and that's so much because she's been so inspiring to people in so many different ways. That's not difficult to understand at all. 

 

 

Also, I'd like to point out that Hamas is not a person.

 

Neither is a computer.

I don't think she qualified under that criteria.

 

We can disagree and still be friends 😁

 

 

[Anderton]

REQUIRED

    

4 hours ago, Jeff Leites said:

Taylor Swift?  Are you kidding me?

 

Time bases its criteria on “the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or ill, and embodied what was important about the year.” (But Jeff, you're right it doesn't have to be a person.) You could make a good case that Hamas fits those criteria, although they've been more about dominating headlines in the last quarter of the year, not the whole year.

 

What's interesting about Taylor Swift is what you see when you scratch beneath the surface. Forget about her just being an entertainer. She blew up the traditional movie studio distribution model with just one (independently produced) movie. She also scared the crap out of record companies when she went ahead and re-recorded her albums, to the extent that companies are now busily revising their contracts to try to make sure artists can't do that again. Her Eras tour affected the economies of entire cities and states, and revitalized a significant part of the travel and hotel business that's still recovering from covid. And on every stop of the tour, she donated significant amounts of money to local food banks. She also does anonymous donations (no one really knows how much, other than her) to various entities and individuals in need, and gave major bonuses to the people who make her tours happen (drivers, lighting, dancers, etc.). She's even become a political force by exhorting fans to get out and vote, although she doesn't tell them who to vote for.

 

And to top it all off, she's a helluva songwriter. But that's just icing on the person of the year cake. She has fundamentally transformed the world of entertainment in ways that will continue to shake out in the years ahead, given serious credibility to the "women can anything in this world" goal as a fait accompli, is an exemplary role model at least IMHO, and grew up in public without imploding.

 

Hamas is part of a middle east political minefield that has been going on for millennia. Now, if they truly do end up starting a hot World War III scenario, then in the future people will look back on this selection and think Hamas would have been a more relevant choice (not unlike how Peter Ueberroth got person of the year in 1984 - in retrospect it should have been Steve Jobs, doncha think?). 

 

[Anderton]

Have you seen the Taylor Swift conspiracy theories? I had no idea that she had given birth to a snake, let alone that she's a transgender guy. Then again, she's also been subject to the usual "Taylor Swift died and was replaced by a lookalike" which has been applied to everyone from Justin Bieber to Vladimir Putin to...well, Taylor Swift.

 

I'm starting to realize you really haven't made it in this world unless there's a conspiracy theory about you. I searched on "conspiracy theories about Craig Anderton" and sadly, there was nothing. But even more sadly, I gave birth to a snake while shapeshifting into a Ventures Mosrite guitar and no one cared!! Clearly, my marketing of myself sucks.

 

 

[jazzpiano88]

22 hours ago, Anderton said:

First of all, I think that's a great choice. But I also can't help but think that someone smart at Time saw that this would be a REALLY good way to sell lots of magazines, especially by putting out three different covers. 

 

It's a perfect storm of news, marketing, sales, and trendiness 

 

 

I read this at first as Time has Named James Taylor Swiftly as their Yearly Person.

 

I still get my Signal Processing Taylor (Swift) math weightings incorrectly when using Bill Gates search (as you'd expect).

 

 

[Sundown]

I like Taylor Swift, but I’ll share an unpopular opinion that I don’t like her newer material. When I listen to tracks off of “Red” or “1989”, I hear exciting mixes, interesting transitions, and arrangements that draw me in. When I hear some of her latest stuff, it’s washed in reverb, there’s limited dynamics, and it just seems rather copy and paste. Songs tend to blend together or sound the same.

 

I’m not a hater by any stretch (I own some of her albums), but I feel like she lost something with her current production team versus the work done with Max Martin and Shellback. 

 

Todd

[Anderton]

I saw an article where someone said Sam Altman of OpenAI would have been a better choice. I think one could make a really strong case that AI will have more of a long-term influence than any artist.

[Notes_Norton]

On 12/10/2023 at 3:21 PM, Anderton said:

I saw an article where someone said Sam Altman of OpenAI would have been a better choice. I think one could make a really strong case that AI will have more of a long-term influence than any artist.

True. Ms. Smith will go the way of Jolson, Sinatra, Elvis, Aretha, and other pop stars, slowly fade away. Altman may make the history books like Marconi, Edison, and Tesla.

 

Or how about Chat GBT as the “person” of the year?

 

There have been some outstanding medical advances made by others this year too.

 

But then, nobody has been more 'visible' than Taylor Smith.

 

Do a top 10, or number one of anything, anywhere, and it's simply a matter of opinion. I recently read an article that put Haitian Divorce as Steely Dan's worst song ever, and I actually love that one. It's one of my favorites.

 

So Time has their opinion and that's all it is.

 

 

Insights and incites by Notes ♫

[Anderton]

5 minutes ago, Notes_Norton said:

So Time has their opinion and that's all it is.

 

They also have a sales department. A Taylor Swift cover will sell a helluva lot more magazines than a Sam Altman cover. 🤑

[Notes_Norton]

14 hours ago, Anderton said:

 

They also have a sales department. A Taylor Swift cover will sell a helluva lot more magazines than a Sam Altman cover. 🤑

Indeed.

 

The only reason for a corporation to exist is to make perpetually increasing profits. If the stock doesn't go up, the number of stockholders go down.

 

It's definitely Taylor's year for a lot of people, making some nice profit.

 

Notes ♫

[Jeff Leites]

7 hours ago, Notes_Norton said:

 

 

The only reason for a corporation to exist is to make perpetually increasing profits. If the stock doesn't go up, the number of stockholders go down.

 

 

One of the companies I worked for required us to read a book called "The Goal".  It stated that the goal of any company was to make a profit for the owner.

[Notes_Norton]

16 hours ago, Jeff Leites said:

One of the companies I worked for required us to read a book called "The Goal".  It stated that the goal of any company was to make a profit for the owner.

This is very true, but there is a difference. This is what I learned in university…

1. An unincorporated business needs to make enough profits to pay the employees and owners. It should make enough additional profit to keep up with inflation, and anything after that is extra.
2. A corporation, on the other hand, typically has 49% of the people expecting a profit not working for the company. And they want their investment to grow much more than the inflation rate. So the corporation needs to do all of #1 (above), plus more profits this quarter than the last quarter — and even more profits for the next quarter than this one — ad infinitum.

While status quo is OK for the small business, the corporation needs to make more, and more, and more, and more, and more, and more profits each quarter than the previous one, or the stockholders will sell their stock. Corporations need perpetual growth, but perpetual growth is not attainable in this world.

 

Once the market is saturated, how does the corporation keep escalating profits to keep the stockholders happy? A few things come to mind,

• cheapen the product,
• planned obsolescence in a world where the population increases,
• use the corporate media to make sure the population increases. I'm old enough to remember the zero population growth movement of the late 1960s/early 1970s. This horrified corporate world, so every day, in every sitcom, interview, drama, news story, and at least a dozen times a day, an actress was saying, “My biological clock is ticking” to her actor mate, which meant, I'd better get pregnant again before I hit menopause. There were 3 billion on the planet then,
• subscriptions for a product that is mature, that will increase more than the inflation rate as soon as the subscription market is saturated,
• tacit bribes in the form of campaign funds to legally evade corporate taxes,
• mechanize to reduce employee paychecks, buy out competition until there is only a cooperative cartel left (usually 3) and raise profits together
• and so on

 

There are a lot of great things about corporate economy, but this is the downside.

 

 

Insights and incites by Notes ♫

[analogika]

That’s just staving off the inevitable death of the company. 
 

The REAL solution is to move on to The Next Big Thing. Profits are secondary unless you don’t really care about the product or the company. 
 

Apple milked the iPod, but more than once, they killed the most successful model at its peak to replace it with where they thought the market would follow. Long before the iPod declined, they were working on iPhone. Etc. 

[Notes_Norton]

That certainly is a creative solution to the problem of market saturation. Apple gets an A+ for that.

[ProfD]

On 12/8/2023 at 11:38 PM, Sundown said:

I like Taylor Swift, but I’ll share an unpopular opinion that I don’t like her newer material.

 

I’m not a hater by any stretch (I own some of her albums), but I feel like she lost something....

It's OK.  Her target audience is eating it up like Skittles.

 

Any interest or money Taylor Swift earns from middle-aged and older consumers/listeners especially men is gravy.😁

 

While I've certainly heard of Ms. Swift based on her popularity and interrupting my football games🙄, personally, I couldn't name one of her songs.😎

[Anderton]

6 hours ago, ProfD said:

I couldn't name one of her songs.

 

"Anti-Hero" immediately came to mind. The lyrics are deeply self-analytical and self-critical. It's also a serious reality check that after all the adulation she's received, her core is still that kid no one understood in high school.

 

Fame never solves problems. But if you're really, really lucky, it won't create too many.

[Notes_Norton]

I'm not fond of Taylor Swift's music. If the music doesn't get to me, I never get to the lyrics. On the other hand, I don't dislike her music either, it just isn't one of the types of music I'm currently into.

 

However, I do respect her talent. She does what she does quite well and is very professional about it. I appreciate the craftsmanship (craftwomanship?) and production. Make that “man” in craftsmanship part of human.

 

Plus, she has some very good marketing people.

 

Question? Is the cover of time even better than being on the cover of the Rolling Stone?

 

Notes ♫

 

 

[George Toledo]

Only loosely related, but I was recently reminded of Juice Newton’s Queen of Hearts, and thought it was almost a proto-Taylor Swift vibe.

 

 

[Anderton]

I can see that. I always liked that song

[RABid]

Well, I decided to watch the Eros tour on Disney+. It's a concert. I can sit through that. ... ... ... With an hour to go of this really long Taylor Swift concert I have finally realized how important it is to be part of the target audience if you want to enjoy a concert. Two and a half hours in, my biggest curiosity is how many times they used those risers wrapped with video screens to lift her into the air, then right back down. It seems more like a Vegas show than a concert, and the music might as well be recorded because the few times they marched the band out on that huge stage for a cameo appearance, then hid them away again, well, it did nothing to make me think they are really playing. After watching another 20 minutes I'm switching to a Santana Concert. Someday I will finish this concert. ... Maybe once I die and come back as a teen age girl.

 

 

(Okay, just to be clear. This is not anti-TS, this is just a realization that it is not for me.)

[Notes_Norton]

When I was just leaving the 'big time' part of the concert tour (we were the opening act) they were just starting to do pre recorded shows. The idea was that now that corporate is involved, and huge money is at stake, nothing was left at risk. 

I'll watch Eras some day, but I'm not in a hurry. It's the tourist season, and I'm gigging 21 times this month.  We do 3 hours straight, no breaks, no costume changes, just straight music. It's live but with backing tracks, but I make the backing tracks myself, so everything you hear on stage us http://www.s-cat.com

 

T.S. and her management team (whoever that is) has done really, really well. She's as big now as Sintara, Elvis and The Beatles were in their day.

[Anderton]

6 hours ago, RABid said:

Well, I decided to watch the Eros tour on Disney+. It's a concert. I can sit through that. ... ... ... With an hour to go of this really long Taylor Swift concert I have finally realized how important it is to be part of the target audience if you want to enjoy a concert. Two and a half hours in, my biggest curiosity is how many times they used those risers wrapped with video screens to lift her into the air, then right back down. It seems more like a Vegas show than a concert, and the music might as well be recorded because the few times they marched the band out on that huge stage for a cameo appearance, then hid them away again, well, it did nothing to make me think they are really playing.

 

Was Eros tour a Freudian slip? 

 

I'm not the target demographic either, and I've never made it all the way through a TS concert video. However, I listen to her CDs, because I enjoy her music. No spectacle required. 

 

Sometimes acts fool me, though. I saw Gino Vanelli in concert by accident. Not my kind of music, yet he was so into it, and came across so well, he won me over. Ditto Frankie Moreno. Then again, neither of them are "spectacle" artists. 

[Thethirdapple]

The show must go on…

 

There’s some music in there somewhere. Seems like whether its because of us the listeners or them the producers, concerts for the sake of the music is not “enough”.

 

is a concert meant to be a spectacle?
 

I certainly don't want to listen to the SAME rendition at a concert as that which I can listen to in the comfort of my studio. But there is something qualitatively different from a show which is “bands” on stage doing there thing like “day on the green” or ol’skool “us festival” type concerts and artist such as JMJ who have always integrated multimedia in their performances.

 

Artists hiring artists to create spectacle is a good thing. And who doesn't love a good light show made with pigmented oil on an overhead projector!

 

 

 

PEACE

_
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[Notes_Norton]

We opened for a “shall remain unnamed band”  years ago, who did their show to a special “live” recording of their songs. Longer, arrangements, endings instead of fades, and so on. The group played along with it but that was mostly for show. 

The musicians were not happy about it, but were happy about the money they were paid (they got 10 times more per person than we did). 

Me? I'd rather play live. But once you “make it” you are not as independent as you were when you weren't famous. You have management, in the physical media days you had the labels telling you what to do, you need to participate in promotion (interviews, etc.) and so many other things are planned for you. It's a well-oiled machine. Very little is left to chance.

We got a taste of that while working for Motown, but we didn't sign the contract because our manager wanted a better deal (he wanted us to actually make money on any recordings).

 

I don't know how extensive this is, or whether or not TS has any pre-recording going on.

She doesn't play my favorite kind of music, but she does what she does quite well. 


Notes ♫

[Anderton]

The concept of live vs. recorded has flipped 180 degrees over the past few decades. You used to hone your songs on the road, then go into the studio and try to capture the live performance magic. Now, you hone your songs in the studio, then go on the road and reproduce the studio experience. 

[Notes_Norton]

On 3/28/2024 at 7:32 AM, Thethirdapple said:

There’s some music in there somewhere. Seems like whether its because of us the listeners or them the producers, concerts for the sake of the music is not “enough”.

Sadly, for pop music, it's the spectacle, not the concert. As a musician, I prefer the old days when it was the music, but I guess I'm in the minority.

Even for a Vegas or other entertainment residency, it's the spectacle. So I guess it's what the majority of the people want.

They draw a big audience, and bring in a ton of money, so I guess they are here to stay — at least until when or if they quit working.

I still go to symphony orchestra concerts, when they are on a day I'm not gigging, and playing a composer that I like. It's still about the music in those events.

I would hope jazz clubs are all about the music, but there are none around here anymore, and if they were, I'd probably be gigging on the same night.

 

 

Notes ♫

[MathOfInsects]

I think there is a distinction between "seeing live music" and "seeing music live." Most of the formal "live" viewing really falls in the "seeing music live" category; "seeing live music" is not a very significant slice of the pie. Small clubs, jazz-related genres, and some artists and acts through the baby-band stage, that's probably it. Once there are major releases to support, I don't think there is a viable path to success without sounding like people expect when they decide to "see music live."

I don't know, though, if this actually different from years past, or if the problem is that the "music live" simply belongs to a new generation of listeners. I haven't seen the Eagles live in concert, for the simple reason that I haven't died and been sentenced to eternity in hell yet, but I get the sense that they have always played every song exactly like their records, short of some solos here and there, and that's been true for essentially every stadium-sized major-label success basically forever. 

I will say that I think the real shift has been to streaming as the new "open mic." People can distribute songs and have them heard without having to guarantee 20 people ing the upstairs Siberia of CBGB. Sure, the open mic scene still gets people heard by other musicians, but I don't think anyone's going out anymore to find out "what's out there," since what's out there is so easily brought "in here" now. 

I can't say that's for better or worse, either. I think it's a draw in the end. Yes, there are fewer butts in seats, but there are also way more ears on tracks, and ultimately that's our goal in the end.