In 2004, Scott Borchetta received a package from a young country artist looking for a record deal. Along with the song demos, “there was an Abercrombie and Fitch catalog,” Borchetta recalled in an interview with Inc. magazine. “And I’m like, well you don’t see that everyday.”
Borchetta is the record executive credited with discovering one of the biggest musical artists of all time. But before she’d even released her first single, Swift had modeled for the preppy clothing brand. In the catalog, she’d bookmarked a picture of herself holding a guitar and wiping her eye with a tissue (presumably a nod to her song “Teardrops on My Guitar,” which would be released a couple years later). “She was a very attractive girl,” Borchetta told Inc., noting that she looked older than her 14 years, and therefore had a shot at making it in the country music market.
Make it she did. Today, as seemingly countless Swift fans are left without tickets to the upcoming tour that will showcase her different “eras”—from curly-haired and Southern accent Taylor to rainbow-gay Pride Taylor—we’re faced with the least fun version of Swift yet: Capitalist Taylor. So far, the bulk of the outrage has fallen on Ticketmaster, the monopolistic concert-and-ticketing conglomerate, while Swift has received comparably less opprobrium, perhaps because of the intimate-seeming fandom relationship she has cultivated over her career. But as that A&F catalog showed all those years ago, Swift has always been one for cultivating brand synergy. Fans, finally noticing this, seem heartbroken.
Last month, Cosmopolitan deemed Swift “Scrooge McDuck–levels of wealthy,” citing an estimate that put her pre-Midnights net worth at $570 million. Her 2018 stadium tour for Reputation is the highest-grossing U.S. tour on record. In 2019, she inked a multiyear deal with Capital One, just ahead of the release of Lover. Her single “ME!” soundtracked a commercial for a 4 percent cash-back card, and Capital One cardholders had the privilege of purchasing a “one-of-a-kind Taylor Swift t-shirt,” which came bundled with a digital version of the album.
For the “Eras” tour, one way to boost your chances to score an entry code for the presale hunger games was to have bought a lot of Swift merch (for example: a wall clock interface that is designed to be hung with four Midnights CDs, sold separately). She also promised a special “Eras” tour presale for Capital One cardholders, which led to several pieces of service journalism urging Swifties to take out a line of credit.
Not that it may have helped them much. The idea was that the two presales were going to give dedicated fans the opportunity purchase tickets ahead of the general public (and scalpers, too). It would have been a mistake to assume that the process of logging onto Ticketmaster at the scheduled time with your code in hand would allow you to calmly exchange money for goods and services—this was Swift’s first tour in four years, after all. But the process was distinctly harrowing. Fans experienced a website that could not accommodate the traffic, and wait times of hours in a digital queue.
Ahead of the Capital One presale, a couple friends and I carefully strategized how much we would pay for tickets, and even concocted back-up plans for what we would do if we couldn’t get enough for everyone in our group. When we finally got to a screen showing us a stadium seating chart, we were offered just two “Karma is My Boyfriend” packages for $755 each, well out of our price range. (What made the packages a couple hundred dollars better than just plain floor seats? Reportedly, they come with extras like a VIP entrance to the stadium, an “Eras” tour tote, and a “crowd-free VIP shopping option.”) Not that we could have bought them anyway; within moments, one of them was…
Read More: Taylor Swift is a capitalist. That’s where her ticketing debacle starts.