If you broke my life down into a series of fun facts, one of the first five would have something to do with loving the music and the persona of Taylor Swift. I think she’s really great.
And, not to brag, but my adoration runs deep: I don’t just listen to the hits and call it a day. I get down and dirty in the Deep Cuts. Some might say that I liked her before she was cool.
So you can imagine my lack of surprise when I heard that her most recent North American tour, aka the Red Tour, basically saved the concert industry from certain doom.
I had the privilege of seeing one of those shows when she came down to Florida last spring.
My expectations were high, and as soon as Ed Sheeran finished his opening act, they were met and then outdone.
There was a doo-wop version of “You Belong With Me,” ridiculously detailed stage decorations, a platform she used to hover above the crowd while she sang “Sparks Fly,” and about 37 costume changes.
It was quite literally perfect.
The money I paid to see her in person ended up being roughly $70 out of the $110 million in ticket sales the Red Tour generated.
And now, finally, it appears as though concerts are profitable again: The industry had its own little mini-recession when the actual recession and overpriced Jonas Brothers tickets burst its bubble back in 2010.
By touring hot on the heels of a wildly successful album and setting ticket prices fairly low, Swift pretty much single-handedly stopped the concert industry from decaying further.
This is a pretty big deal, not just for the concert industry but for music as a whole.
When Beyoncé Knowles released “Beyoncé” late last year, it sold about a million copies.
But it was also illegally downloaded a quarter of a million times, meaning what would have been $3.8 million became $0.
And in 2013 alone, her entire catalog was downloaded 2 million times for free.
I’m not going to sit here and judge people because they got music for free. That’s the record companies’ problem.
The Internet requires that they change the way they do business.
They won’t be able to actually sell records for much longer.
For every sucker who pays good, old-fashioned American dollars to download an album, there’s someone else who did the exact same thing for free.
The exact same process, the exact same result — but one of them also just bought lunch for a Columbia executive. Soon that person is going to wise up and get their music for free, too.
This is why the revival of the concert is so important. It’s, like, the only thing the music industry could reliably make money on anymore. It’s a lot harder to sneak into a concert without paying for it than it is to get music from the Internet — not impossible, but a lot harder. That, and people are willing to pay to see their favorite artists in person, even if they won’t pay to listen to that artist’s recordings.
Now that Taylor Swift showed the world that tours can be profitable again, we’ll see more and more of them.
So if you enjoy the existence of a music industry, thank a Taylor Swift fan. You owe them.
Alec Carver is a UF journalism freshman. His columns appear on Fridays. A version of this column ran on page 3 on 1/17/2014 under the headline "Taylor Swift resurrects concert business"
