The Dubious Ethics of Taylor Swift: "Capitalist Queen" and "Girlboss Billionaire"?

If you know me at all, you'll know that I love Taylor Swift - I have been a mega fan for the last sixteen years. I have listened to every album, absorbed all her lyrics, learnt the lore, found solace in her stories and immersed myself in the beautiful sonic world she has created.

If you know me a little more, you'll also know that I am a proud, self-avowed socialist. Not long into my uni years, I joked to my flatmates, "You know the way scientists have worked out that the right hemisphere of the brain controls language, logic and analysis? And the left is associated with creativity, spatial ability and emotions? Well, I'm sure if those scientists cut my brain in half, they would see Taylor Swift on one side and Socialism on the other." This is how I introduced myself to people I hardly knew. These two passions (Taylor Swift and socialism) are so critical to who I am that they were the very first things I told people about myself. 

From there, they could draw their conclusions about whether to be my friend or not!

So, I want to discuss these two passions. Specifically, how they have come into direct opposition with each other over the past year or so... I want to showcase how feminism has been co-opted by late-stage capitalism and how capitalism and sexism are intrinsically linked, and Taylor Swift is the perfect lens through which to view this discussion. Taylor Swift is the cultural touchstone for wider, necessary conversations about the super-wealthy. You may be surprised at how the dubious ethics of Taylor Swift are actually deeply philosophical. So, whether you love her, hate her, love to hate her, or feel like you hear too much about her: this article is for you.

Firstly, let's unpack the dubious ways Taylor Swift was able to become a billionaire because it is not solely due to the music she has created. Oftentimes, it is hard to conceptualise what $1 billion actually means. So picture it like this: 1 million seconds is the equivalent of 12 days, and 1 billion seconds is the equivalent of 30 years. When put this way, you can see the vast difference between numbers we often just think of as big. As of 2024, Taylor Swift's net worth is $1.1 billion. So... how did Taylor Swift amass such wealth? This question can be broken down into two main categories: her music and her business ventures.

In 2023, Swift's revenue from her songwriting catalogue and streaming royalties was $611 million. The "Eras Tour" was the highest-grossing tour of all time, generating $1.04 billion in profits, with the concert film amassing $261.2 million in profits. Now, let's talk merch. In my humble opinion, a lot of Swift's merch is ugly and lazily designed, often using cheap and unsustainable materials such as rayon and polyester. But...Taylor Swift knows that her merch store can turn a pretty penny. It was estimated that Swift made 200 million dollars from merch sales at the 2023 "Eras Tour" shows alone. I noticed Swift's encouragement of rampant overconsumption when, in 2022, ahead of the release of "Midnights," Swift revealed there would be four vinyl variations of the album which, when bought together, could be assembled into a clock. Who needs four variants of the same album? Swift deliberately fed into her fans' materialistic instincts and made them feel like it was necessary to buy all the variants. Not only did this increase Swift's profits, but it also ensured "Midnights" would enter the charts at a high number due to presale orders. Another way Swift keeps her profits high is by continuously releasing new, limited-edition variations of already-released work. As other artists released albums, Swift strategically dropped voice memos and acoustic versions of songs from "The Tortured Poets Department" to maintain her number 1 position on the charts and boost sales. For example, in May, Swift released voice memo versions of "The Black Dog," "Cassandra," and "Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?" each priced at $5.99.

Whilst it is not directly related to her status as a billionaire, it would be remiss not to mention Taylor Swift's private jet usage as the mega-wealthy are a class of people that cause irreparable harm to the planet. In 2022, Swift's private jet usage amounted to an estimated 8300 tonnes of carbon emissions, which is approximately 1800 times higher than the average person's emissions. So, what was the public's reaction to Swift's new era as a billionaire? As to be expected, there was a lot of bootlicking and excuse-making.

Perhaps it is easy to forget, but billionaires are always morally corrupted. It is easy for many fans of Taylor Swift to excuse her billionairedom because they like her as a public figure - she seems sweet, approachable, relatable, and like she could be your best friend. She writes lyrics that millions of us relate to on a deeply personal level. Taylor Swift breaks the mold of the brutish face of billionaires such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. These people are easy to dislike because they are, frankly, deeply unlikable characters. But it appears harder for people to condemn someone they otherwise really admire. But I want to remind any fans of Taylor that just because you like her art does not mean you have to endorse everything she does. I certainly do not, and I have been a card-carrying swiftie for sixteen years. Just because I support a billionaire's art does NOT mean I support the "art" of being a billionaire. Swift seems like a softer, kinder form of billionaire; some even dub her an "ethical" billionaire because she regularly donates to food banks on tour and gives large financial bonuses to her crew.

But I have to say; even when the title "billionaire" comes wrapped in a pink glittery ribbon ornamented in love hearts and lyrics, it does not cover up the ugly truth that the act of amassing a billion dollars is unethical in itself. It is wrong to hoard wealth. It is not a status symbol or indicative of hard work or anything anyone ever deserves. It is a symptom of a deeply unjust distribution system which certain people have been able to exploit to their own advantage. And most importantly, the oppressor cannot also be the liberator. Taylor Swift cannot make piecemeal attempts to try and "fix" a problem that she is causing and which she directly profits from. If you find yourself being convinced that there is such thing as an "ethical billionaire," remember that the combined wealth of the top five richest people in the world (Musk, Arnault, Bezos, Ellison and Zuckerberg) has increased by $464 billion whilst the total wealth of the poorest 4.77 billion people has decreased by 0.2% in real terms. Imagine what those billions of dollars could do if they were invested in public services and infrastructure. Let's not laud literal billionaires for giving paltry amounts of money in comparison to their riches to food banks - something which wouldn't even exist if wealth distribution was fair.

So, how does Taylor Swift address the criticisms of her becoming a billionaire? In her 2023 TIME Person of the Year interview with Sam Lansky, she stated, "And what has existed since the dawn of time? A patriarchal society. What fuels a patriarchal society? Money, the flow of revenue, the economy. So actually, if we're going to look at this in the most cynical way possible, feminine ideas becoming lucrative means that more female art will get made. It's extremely heartening." Taylor, how can this be both cynical and heartening? Here, Swift offers a dubious justification for her billionaire status, claiming that her amassing such wealth will help more female art get made. This contention is simply untrue as female musicians still face massive amounts of gendered discrimination, such as earning a tenth less than their male counterparts. This isn't even factoring in other fields such as film, TV, theatre and physical art. Women's art has not been made more lucrative, Taylor Swift's has. For more on this topic, I have linked two elucidating articles about the gender discrimination faced by women in the artistic world more broadly here and here.

So, I found Swift's statement astonishingly tone-deaf to the real world of philosophical politics. She is reiterating the "girl-bossified" form of feminism which contends that women's liberation entails allowing women to play in the same dirty game as men, no matter how exploitative that game is. She is justifying her becoming a billionaire on the shaky premise that the production and appreciation of women’s art is the solution to ending sexism, and therefore her vast wealth is rightfully and justifiably earned. While Swift is an extremely astute songwriter, credited for detailing and legitimising the female experience, it cannot be denied that she exploits the labour of poor women turning out her merchandise in developing countries. Her wealth is not just produced by her artistic labour but is embedded in a network of economic practices which do not create space for other women to produce a better life for themselves. In that way, girl-boss feminism is not very persuasive or attractive. It is a facet of neoliberal globalisation.

This "girl-bossified" feminism needs to be seen in the light of Laurie Penny’s contention that whilst women in the so-called "West" are fighting to break the glass ceiling, there are, "millions of women standing in the basement – and the basement is flooding." I would add that the flood in the basement is largely caused by people like Taylor Swift. The cold-hearted, calculated capitalists of the world profit from the exploitation of labour, of the planet, of the most vulnerable in society, and above all else, of the very systems that support life itself. Penny demonstrates that sexism and capitalism are so intertwined that feminism has now become akin to a "trickle-down," liberation strategy. As such, it is in vogue in certain quarters to propose that women taking on more traditional masculine roles has a liberative function in addressing sexism. At best, this may have some validity, but only for a very limited number of privileged, predominantly white women.

As exemplified by Swift and challenged by Penny, we as a society have leaned into the crude idea that if we can elevate women to the role which men play in capitalism, then we have achieved liberation, and capitalist institutions can become a "force for good." I bring up these examples to reiterate the fact that sexism and capitalism mutually reinforce each other, and we have reached a point in human history where we now view integrating more people into this brutal capitalist system as constituting "meaningful" ways to tackle sexism. There is a political theory called "Post-Politics." Without going into too much depth, the theory asserts that free-market neoliberalism has been able to run so freely that we now live in a world in which we are told there is "no alternative" to capitalism. We as citizens are no longer viewed as humans, but rather solely as consumers. Subsequently, neoliberalism has evolved well beyond the bounds of just being an economic theory. It has now infected our interpersonal relationships, our dating lives, our schooling, our entertainment, and perhaps most tragically of all, as seen through Taylor Swift, our activist movements such as women's liberation. If you want a flavour of true feminism, look no further than Scottish-born Irish republican and socialist James Connolly who asserted, "the worker is the slave of the capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave." Connolly understood the unique oppression women face under capitalism and made it known that anti-sexist movements are intrinsically linked to anti-capitalist movements. Ultimately, contrary to what people like Taylor Swift would have us believe, feminism at its roots is bad for business because things women fight for, such as maternity provisions, equal pay, and higher taxes to finance a welfare state that supports working mothers etc, cannot coexist with harsh capitalism.

At one point in time, I found myself torn between the two opposing forces in my brain. But on reflection, I have concluded that Taylor Swift is selling people a dream in a world which has increasingly become a nightmare. Ultimately, Taylor Swift is not the be-all and end-all when it comes to this discussion. I have used her as a starting point for an exploration of what kind of feminists and activists we want to be. Are we content subscribing to the Swiftian vision for the world? That of white liberal, trickle-down feminism? Or can we strive to be more radical? To build a world truly free of oppression of women? A world which does not shackle us to the confines of capitalism? I believe the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci offers a much better call for action. He asserts, "educate yourself because we'll need all your intelligence. Stir yourselves because we'll need all your enthusiasm. Organise yourselves because we'll need all your strength." So, "capitalist queens" and "girlboss billionaires?" I'm not buying it.