Interesting post by Robin James at It's Her Factory about how we've moved into "Pop's Franchise Era".
Noting the Bob Dylan biopic and the horrific thought that each individual Beatle is getting their own biopic, she argues that what already unfolded in Hollywood - franchization, cinematic universes, stars replaced by characters - is taking hold in pop music. Not just with Legacy Artists, but with relatively young, musically active stars who are prematurely Legacy-izing.
Hence Taylor Swift's Eras tour: only 34, she's already consolidating the exploitation of her archive in the way that Bowie did with his Sound + Vision tour of 1990 and the Rolling Stones have done since the late '80s.
Robin writes:
"... When Swift repackaged all her individual albums into a catalog of “eras” for a tour of that same name, she created a universe; each album set the vibe for world-building sets, costumes, and the like. The same is true of Beyonce’s various acts: there’s the house music act, the country act, and purportedly a forthcoming rock act....
"Taylor and Beyonce are franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe. They are not stars, per se, but tested and proven brand IP that the industry leverages into blockbuster content like the Eras and Renaissance tours and concert films. And they franchise not just in the music industry, but across media – that’s what the Taylor and Beyonce beats at Gannett are, new locations of existing franchises. I will be the last person to be surprised if and when they build a Taylor Swift theme park....
"With their “portfolio careers” spanning various industries like apparel, beauty, instruments, and food... , pop stars treat their own brands as a franchise.... Pop artists are less like stars and more like characters whose vibes grace everything from athleisure to sweet potato pies.
"The problem, of course, is that this concentrates all the wealth in the hands of the richest artists and corporations...
"In August 2023 Billboard published a piece asking “Why Aren’t More Pop Stars Being Born?”
That is a great post. The other parallel between the franchise entertainers and IP-based movies is that they are both very much team efforts. The star is the face, and probably quite often the driving creative force, of the enterprise. But behind them there are huge teams of writers, producers, musicians, stylists, choreographers, photographers, etc, etc, who play vital roles in creating the finished product.
ReplyDeleteThe growing concentration of wealth in the hands of the richest artists and corporations is a very long-established trend, though.
Here's an academic economics paper on it from back in 1981: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1803469
I don't think that such franchising is "new", or even especially commentable in its current variety. We'd had Sinatra as singer/filmstar/TV personality/comedian in the fifties. Elvis' films may be ropey, but he did make 31 of the fuckers in 13 years. Hip-hop's been replete with the image of the rapper-cum-mogul-cum-brand for decades. It's notable that Will Smith rather contradicted this multifaceted approach when he decided he ultimately had to choose between rapping and acting, and chose acting. Hell, the examples of Justin Timberlake and will.i.am.a.massive.bellend show that this has been a continuous phenomenon in American music (what's the most prominent British example? Cilla Black, maybe?). At one point, Robin James writes, "I will be the last person to be surprised if and when they build a Taylor Swift theme park." Has Robin James not heard of Dollywood?
ReplyDeleteI think it's a useful redescription of known things, drawing the parallel between the concentration and dominance of the few within the attention economy in Hollywood.... the retro aspect, the exploitation of IP, I think is a significant development.
ReplyDeleteBut yeah, the idea of becoming an all-round entertainer is an old showbiz goal. Presley's manager pushed him that way... Hollywood and Vegas is where the real money, the long-lasting money is.
There's plenty of British examples... The Beatles with the films, including Yellow Submarine... and many other spin offs (Lennon's books like In Me Own Write and appearance in the film How I Won the War)... I only just learned about the Beatles Illustrated Lyrics books.... and of course Apple...
And then Bowie had this conception of himself (all round entertainer, polymath) from the start and pursued it all through his career. Acting in film, in theatre. I just learned about the videogame Omikron: The Nomad Soul that he co-created, which the album the Hours was a soundtrack to...
I like Robin James. Her book "Resilience" is pretty good.
ReplyDeleteI think Robin kind of missed something in the comparison to franchising, though. She's kind of talking about licensing rather than franchising. The difference is that in franchising you're turning over the reproduction of the brand to others. What Swift is doing might be overkill in the licensing and branding departments, but she's not extending her commercial footprint through the work of proxies. Franchising would be like starting "The Taylor Swift Experience" with 17 other Taylors on tours around the world while Taylor sits at home counting her cash-- and who knows, with fans already going nuts outside stadium parking lots just to listen to her stuff from afar, it would probably take off.
With Robin's valid point about the consolidation of power and money in view, I think it's more useful to see Taylor Swift and Beyonce not as brands franchising themselves so much as franchisees working for a single industry called The Music Industry. (This is especially evident in Beyonce's country music turn.) Maybe the "franchise era" is where artists willingly fold themselves into the centralized pop industry, which in turn uses them to extend its commercial viability, both parties joined in a symbiotic relationship that maximizes their money-making ability while minimizing risk. They're more like artists willingly joining up with the legacy industry to become equal stakeholders in a cartel mobilized against the perils of the digital age.
Known things, perhaps, but we're not quite hip to how tightly the new business relationships are. Surely the corporate control of music has never been this bad.
Yes, I think that’s exactly right. As I understand it, in the film industry the defining characteristic of a franchise is that it is based on intellectual property owned by the production company. In an Iron Man film, the draw for audiences is not Robert Downey Jr, the actor, but Iron Man, the character.
DeleteThe significance of that is that, in theory at least, it shifts the balance of power between capital (the studios / production companies) and labor (the actors). If a studio has a series of successful films, it doesn’t need to give up too much of the profit from those films to the actors who appear in them. Tobey Maguire can be replaced by Andrew Garfield who can be replaced by Tom Holland, and audiences don’t care: it’s still Spider-Man. So the studio doesn’t need to offer exorbitant pay packages to retain the talent.
It’s hard to see a direct equivalent of that in music. Beyoncé Knowles as an individual is actually vital to the success of “Beyoncé” as a musical project. They can’t do it without her. So her bargaining power, and hence her share of the proceeds, is much higher.
Kiss was the band who first made a brand of branding their name onto any and all products (the Kiss coffin is oft cited as the ne plus ultra of this approach). So should this phenomenon of relentless licensing by popstars be called taking the Kiss (sorry, that was the best I could think of)?
ReplyDeleteIn any case, it indicates that this phenomenon, as I said before, is not new. Indeed, Kiss' embrace of selling out was worthy of remark, but now such practices are routine, then there's nowt special about Taylor Swift's smorgasbord of merchandise.
I don't think the issue is whether this phenomenon is new, but whether it is metastasizing, becoming the dominant, perhaps eventually the only cultural form.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me to be a form of ossification, like that J.G. Ballard short story where the world is slowly turning into solid crystal. The wellsprings of the culture have run dry, and all is the endless repetition of machine-patternwork.
A group that took a leaf out of Kiss's book, or maybe just came up with themselves in response to fan demand, is - oddly - The Grateful Dead. By the '90s it seemed like almost anything you could wish to purchase (slight exag) could be bought in some Dead-branded, overpriced form - Grateful Dead surfboard
ReplyDeletePerhaps "franchise" isn't the right analogy then, but there is something remorseless and dominating about the way that Taylor Swift and Beyonce keep both shoring up and expanding their reach.
ReplyDeleteThe methodical and almost military way Beyonce is going through the genres - not even genres, but entire formations of tradition, entire audiences - house music with the last album, country.
Like, was the world crying out for Beyonce's take on house music? Her take on country? And then rock is next, apparently.
David Stubbs had some remarks elsewhere: "Been listening to some of the new Beyoncé album, as well as videos and I have to say it is formidable.... And yet, as I often find with Beyoncé, I can't warm to her products, while admiring the impeccable judgment, attained by hiring a squadron of the very great and very good, making sure every last detail works, that nothing is left to chance. It's like she is CEO of Beyoncécorp, which demands not lowest common denominator expedient blandness but the sort of avant garde excellence you would expect from a high end perfume. Perhaps part of it is that she is not creating new forms so much as brilliantly reworking old ones. There isn't a feeling of originality being birthed, the way you got with, say, Stevie Wonder in the 70s. As such, her work feels like a frighteningly superb form of AI, reworking the input of existing forms and ingredients..."
The Grateful Dead merch empire, like the thousands of retrospective live albums, are basically officially sanctioned, quality controlled versions of what the fans were already doing - as they acquired a following that traveled alongside them, the more enterprising fans would fund this by selling their unofficial branded goods in parking lot markets to either other followers or less devoted fans showing up for that one show.
ReplyDeleteEventually, as the following exploded in the late 80s - early 90s, and a lot of frat boys and such began showing up purely for the parking lot party (which in turn attracted the attention of local government and nearby businesses not particularly happy to see a wandering open-air drug fair hit their town), the Dead was forced to crack down and started offering their own, sanctioned merch in order to try and tamp down (only somewhat successfully) on the delinquent element
Re: Stubbs' comment about Beyoncé, he's also describing the curated aspect of Drake, Travis Scott or Kanye West's albums, where they compensate for their own weaknesses as rappers and singers by bringing out a huge list of guests. Maybe Stubbs is speaking more about style. COWBOY CARTER is tasteful in a way that can be grating ("Blackbird" makes me think of exit music for an Oscar bait biopic), but it's as close to eccentric as she's ever gotten, with pleasurably fragmentary songs in its second half.
ReplyDeleteI think Stubbs' AI comparison is a bit harsh, but what's odd about Beyonce and Swift is that in their case the brand management is not just the behind-the-scenes action or the undercurrent, but the explicit artistic point of what they do. It's four-quadrant marketing and image pivots and yearly spreadsheets and planned obsolescence as fan-approved-and-obsessed ends in themselves. There's plenty of past examples of this trend, but they do seem like the ultimate exponents of it
ReplyDeleteYes! I think Swift is particularly interesting in that sense. Her music may be unremarkable, but her career is truly radical. The way she uses fan interactions, interviews, paparazzi sightings, social media, etc, to build a persona, taking full advantage of all the new opportunities available in the online world, is astonishingly innovative. She is telling a years-long story about "Taylor Swift", her publicly created character, that has fascinated millions.
ReplyDeleteOne of the key techniques is to set challenges, like mystery stories or crossword puzzles, that fans try to solve. Clues are dropped on social media, in lyrics, in choices of clothes and locations, posing questions for the world to decipher. Why was she holding that particular cat in her Time magazine cover photo? What did Selena Gomez say to her at the Golden Globes? Sometimes the questions get answered, but more often fans get to let their creativity run riot and imagine whatever answers they like, and that's what the fun is. It's like a benign version of QAnon.
As Tyler says, often the commercial strategies at work are completely transparent and accepted by the fans as part of the entertainment. The most obvious recent example being Swift's relationship with Travis Kelce. It's like Napoleon's marriage to Marie Louise: a strategic union designed to bring peace between the two hostile empires of Swifties and NFL fans.
This is a good point from Dorian Lynskey, too: the increased concentration of wealth and market power is also determining music criticism and commentary: https://x.com/Dorianlynskey/status/1774848802081374296?s=20
ReplyDeleteOne facet of all this is the, in my opinion lamentable, American fixation on the appearance of professionalism by musicians. The media saturation of Taylor Swift and Beyonce are seen as proof of their industriousness, their competence, their value-for-money. And again, this is a decades-old attitude, that of the pinnacle being the all-round entertainer appealing to as many as possible. But it's antithetical to amateurism, in the original, noblest meaning of that word. The Beatles indulging their eccentricities would have received much shorter shrift had they been American. Cowboy Carter is not being treated as an idiosyncratic work, or even a labour of love, but as a calculated chessmove.
ReplyDeleteIn economics, one of the motivations for advertising is not just to inform the potential purchaser of the product, but also to inform the potential purchaser of the reliability of the seller, in order to counter the negative effects of information asymmetry. So the advertising avalanche of these acts has the economic reasoning of assuring the audience of the artists' professionalism, which is what American audiences seem to demand. But it implies that what they're selling is product, akin to a Toyota Corolla or a Hotpoint washing machine. The work demonstrates slickness, but not fondness.
Apparently Taylor Swift is a billionaire. That's pretty Gilded Age, oligopolistic.
ReplyDeleteOne other possibility - both "Taylor Swift" and "Beyonce" are CIA psy-ops.
ReplyDeleteIt's not out of the question. If Jackson Pollock was a CIA operation - which he was - I absolutely don't see why Beyonce can't be.
ReplyDeleteI know somebody who is convinced that the 1960's British Invasion was an MI6 op to curry American favour.
ReplyDeleteBut, semi-seriously, I think any cultural event where the media work in lockstep is suspect in my opinion, and the level of coordination around Swift is pretty staggering. There is a feint but persistent Deep State whiff about it.
The thought of all those biopics does sound awful, but I'm surprised at people's doom and gloom about this: if you're interested in there being a counter-culture again this all a good thing. As with Hollywood's franchising of Marvel to death, franchising Beyoncé and Taylor Swift is a sign of weakness in the music industry, not strength. It may take a lot of corporate control to carry this out, but they are circling the wagons at this point.
ReplyDeleteAsk your neighbours how many Taylor Swift songs they can name: I bet they do very poorly. This stuff has huge amounts of money thrown at it, but it isn't that popular.
And now here come Kiss literally turning themselves into a franchise, selling their IP to be used, not by another group of humans, but by AI.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.bbc.com/news/business-68735699