Taylor Swift’s Great Leap Forward

By Jeremie

Taylor Swift’s enormous success throws a giant shadow over all of popular music, but especially so over country music. A self-made teenage artist suddenly dwarfing all acts? She has done it.

But she is not, as many experts are predicting, leading a massive shift in country music to very young audiences. She is her own massive shift.

People forget that Swift created her audience where none existed before: She invented the audience of teenage female country music fans. Why have they flocked to her in such numbers? Because she is one of them. She knows what they’re thinking, what they like and dislike, what they’re passionate about. She writes their songs for them. No adult songwriters working in the tune factories in Nashville could have written such music credibly, nor could the major country labels have found a way to deliver it credibly to teenage audiences. Of course, it never occurred to anyone in the adult music world that such a thing was possible. An indie label, Big Machine, did help her deliver her music in the CD and digital worlds after she had already amassed a huge online audience.

Link to full story: http://www.cmt.com/news/nashville-skyline/1599910/nashville-skyline-taylor-swifts-great-leap-forward.jhtml