"Kids these days" only want a selfie, 24-year-old singer Taylor Swift laments in an op-ed about the future of the music industry and the changing nature of celebrity.
In the editorial, published late Monday to the Wall Street Journal’s website, Swift counters the argument that the music industry is dying and albums are relics of a long-gone era.
But she also discusses how social media has altered what it means to be in the celebrity spotlight in the digital age.
On autographs:
Swift says she hasn’t been asked for an autograph “since the invention of the iPhone with a front-facing camera.
“The only memento ‘kids these days’ want is a selfie. It's part of the new currency, which seems to be ‘how many followers you have on Instagram.’”
On Twitter:
She then says an actress friend recently told her that she was in competition for a role with one other actress, and “the casting director chose the actress with more Twitter followers.”
She does not name the actress, the role or say whether the casting director actually told the actress that he or she wanted someone with a bigger social media presence.
But Swift thinks this will become a trend that impacts the music industry.
“For me, this dates back to 2005 when I walked into my first record-label meetings, explaining to them that I had been communicating directly with my fans on this new site called Myspace,” she writes. “In the future, artists will get record deals because they have fans -- not the other way around.”
On file sharing:
The primary focus of Swift’s editorial, however, is the oft-touted death of the music industry. She acknowledges that file sharing and streaming have had a dramatic impact on record sales, and that artists are handling “this blow” in different ways.
“Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for. It's my opinion that music should not be free, and my prediction is that individual artists and their labels will someday decide what an album's price point is,” Swift writes.
Swift, perhaps best known for putting her relationships to sheet music, notes the difference between one-hit wonders and top-40 tracks that are forgotten within a couple of months, and artists whose albums fans will share with their children and grandchildren.
On YouTube:
She also says that in an age when fans are recording parts of her concerts and then immediately posting the clips to YouTube, forming a bond with fans will mean “constantly providing them with the element of surprise.
“No, I did not say ‘shock’: I said ‘surprise.’”
For her recent tour, she brought in other artists to sing their own hits as duets with her.
“My generation was raised being able to flip channels if we got bored, and we read the last page of the book when we got impatient. We want to be caught off guard, delighted, left in awe,” Swift writes.
“I hope the next generation's artists will continue to think of inventive ways of keeping their audiences on their toes, as challenging as that might be.”
