Superfans: A playlist
A little over a year ago, when I kicked off this blog series about my book, Superfans: Power, Technology, and Money in the Music Industry, I promised awesome playlists. I had every intention of fulfilling that promise, but if I did, you would have just gotten a whole lot of Taylor Swift and only Taylor Swift… here’s why.
As far back as I can remember, my brain operated best while listening to music. I read To Kill A Mockingbird for my middle school English class in one sitting while listening to Taking Back Sunday and Blink-182. I aced my Comparative Politics final at Lehigh University to TV on the Radio and MGMT (should out to Professor Fennell for being so cool and allowing us listen to music during our finals). I wrote my book, Superfans: Power, Technology, and Money in the Music Industry, while cycling through all the artists I mention in the book from MisterWives to Great Good Fine OK to Lizzo.
Like many working adults, I spend most of my waking hours at work. For the past fourteen months of working remotely, I have spent most of my time on Zoom video calls. This means that I rarely get to listen to music while I work. Listening to music at work demarcates the time for me to focus deeply versus the time I spend rapidly switching contexts.
Yet throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, I have found myself reacting to music differently than ever before. Instead of cruising through data analysis or document reviews, I’ve been distracted or distraught. Hozier’s “Almost (Sweet Music)” brought me to tears as I recalled seeing them at Boston Calling at Boston City Hall Plaza in Fall 2015 and deeply longed for live music. New releases blended together and I couldn’t make sense of them. I’ve gotten easily distracted by playlists of mixed artists or genres, despite always being someone with an eclectic music taste (I used to maintain hefty running lists of new releases from small bands for a given year from a wide variety of genres, like this one from 2017 with nearly 2,000 songs).
Since I simply cannot be crying at work to Hozier all the time when I need to be deeply focusing (though I was able to lament about this problem to my very supportive co-workers in our #music slack channel), I had to figure this out. Silence was not going to cut it and nothing else I tried worked… for months I was lost. Then, I tried listening only to Taylor Swift.
I first discovered that I could focus to Taylor Swift when she released folklore. It changed my pandemic remote work life. I could focus again. I was me again.
I am a huge fan of Taylor Swift’s work and her impact on the music industry. I feature her in my book Superfans as a prime example of an artist who understands the power of fans and has harnessed that power to make changes in the industry. She spoke out against Scooter Braun despite his attempts to silence her, she’s re-recording her catalog so that she owns her music outright, and she has arguably one of the most active fanbases ever (her “Swifties”). She’s awesome — the end.
But until very recently, I was not able to be productive at work unless I was listening to only Taylor Swift. I’d start at the top of her catalog on Spotify and before I knew it, I’d be well into Red (and my to do list). The problem with only listening to Taylor Swift for nearly a year straight is that she doesn’t need me to… but smaller bands really do. These smaller, newer bands need our streaming counts and shares and likes, and they need them now more than ever. I have spent the last ten or so months feeling like I’m cheating on all the small bands I have yet to discover with Taylor Swift in order to get work done — completely ignoring my own advice and feeling like a not-so-super fan.
As I am adjusting to post-vaccination life in other ways like returning to the rock climbing gym and wearing hard pants again, I figured it was time to try to break from my COVID music habits as well. I have been working on resuming my superfan listening habits again and I only revert back to Taylor Swift about half the time.
For now, I am starting from a place of comfort with the playlist that carried me through one of the most difficult academic achievements of my life — writing and publishing my first book, Superfans. It still has one of the very first working titles of my book, The Perfect Lineup, and to me, for now, it’s the perfect lineup to get me out of this funk.
Promise fulfilled.
