OSP: Taylor Swift CSP - Audience and Industries

Audience

Background and audience wider reading

Read this Guardian feature on stan accounts and fandom. Answer the following questions:

1) What examples of fandom and celebrities are provided in the article?

The article mentions Julia Fox, Alexander Wang, Keke Palmer, Taylor Swift, Matty Healy and Kanye West. 

2) Why did Taylor Swift run into trouble with her fanbase? 

When the presale for Taylor Swift’s tour turned into a battle royale for fans locked out of Ticketmaster’s system, frazzled Swifties voiced their disappointment. Ticketmaster and Swift quickly apologized, with the singer calling the process “excruciating”. Ticketmaster ended up testifying in Congress in a hearing about consolidation in the ticketing industry.

3) Do stan accounts reflect Clay Shirky's ideas regarding the 'end of audience'? How? 

Stan accounts reflect the end of audience as they create their own content about the celebrities they follow, engaging with the producers directly via almost becoming producers themselves. 

Read this Conversation feature on the economics of Taylor Swift fandom. Answer the following questions: 

1) What do Taylor Swift fans spend their money on? 

Albums, merchandise and concert tickets. 

2) How does Swift build the connection with her fans? Give examples from the article.

By handpicking fans for “secret sessions” before album releases (often held in her own home) and hosting post-show meet and greets, over the past 16 years she has carefully built the illusion of these relationships as reciprocated friendship. For these events, she memorises facts about each fan in attendance, surprising them with comments about new haircuts, academic achievements and relationship milestones. She also has a history of sending fans surprise gifts in the mail, ranging from handwritten letters of support to gift boxes full of things she says “remind her” of the fan in question.

3) What have Swifties done to try and get Taylor Swift's attention online? 

When Swift’s official social media team, Taylor Nation, engage with fans – by liking, replying to, or retweeting their messages – individuals often put the date and type of interaction in their bio to broadcast the attention they received to others within the fandom community. The Taylor Nation twitter account retweets and engages with fans who have shared screenshots of merchandise receipts (from increasingly frequent, themed merchandise releases), pictures of themselves with multiple copies of albums, or particularly over-the-top displays of emotion and creativity.

4) Why is fandom described as a 'hierarchy'? 

They are hierarchical structures in which fans have their status elevated by participating in certain ways. For Swift fans, these hierarchies are heavily tied to practices of consumption, including the purchasing of concert tickets.

5) What does the article suggest is Swift's 'business model'? 

Swift’s business model is largely built on fan desire to meet her.

Taylor Swift: audience questions and theories

Work through the following questions to apply media debates and theories to the Taylor Swift CSP. You may want to go back to your previous blogpost or your A3 annotated booklet for examples. 

1) Is Taylor Swift's website and social media constructed to appeal to a particular gender or audience?

Her website uses serif topography which gives off a sophisticated and feminine look, appealing to her audience which is mostly made up of millennial and Gen Z white women. 

2) What opportunities are there for audience interaction in Taylor Swift's online presence and how controlled are these? 

Both her Eras tour minisite and her social media accounts on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter provide opportunities for fan interactions with Taylor Swift, with the Eras tour minisite displaying social media posts from each show. 

3) How does Taylor Swift's online presence reflect Clay Shirky’s ‘End of Audience’ theories? 

Taylor Swift's fan base are encouraged to interact with her posts on social media in order to get noticed by her and therefore have a bigger chance of meeting her in real life. As a result, fans will directly engage with the producer and also become producers of content themselves through this process.

4) What effects might Taylor Swift's online presence have on audiences? Is it designed to influence the audience’s views on social or political issues or is this largely a vehicle to promote Swift's work? 

While Taylor Swift's influential platform is often leveraged by her in order to promote her views on current events or politics, such as her endorsement of Kamala Harris in the presidential election, her relationship with her fan base is mostly used by her to promote her work through posting about album releases, music videos and tour dates. 

5) Applying Hall’s Reception theory, what might be a preferred and oppositional reading of Taylor Swift's online presence? 

The preferred reading of Taylor Swift's online presence could perhaps be that Swift cares about cultivating personal relationships with her fans and standing up for the social causes that she believes in the most. The oppositional reading could be that she deliberately constructs her social media presence to manipulate her fans into spending more money on her merchandise and concert tickets. 

Industries

How social media companies make money

Read this analysis of how social media companies make money and answer the following questions:

1) How many users do the major social media sites boast?

Meta (Facebook) had 2.96 billion monthly active users in 2022. Twitter had 330 million monthly active users in 2019. LinkedIn had 900 million monthly active users as of 2023.

2) What is the main way social media sites make money? 

The real transaction here isn’t you receiving enjoyment in the form of a free temporary distraction created by a media company at great expense. That media company is renting your eyeballs to its advertisers.

3) What does ARPU stand for and why is it important for social media companies? 

ARPU stands for 'Average Revenue Per User'. It is a measurement that helps all types of companies understand how much money on average they are generating from a single customer over a set period of time.

4) Why has Meta spent huge money acquiring other brands like Instagram and WhatsApp? 

WhatsApp boasts over 2 billion monthly active users, which to Meta management means an even greater stock of susceptible minds to sell as a unit to companies looking to, for instance, move a few more smartphones this quarter. "WhatsApp - Statistics & Facts." Every acquisition Meta has made since, whether it was $1 billion for Instagram or $19 billion for WhatsApp, was conducted with the same goal in mind.

5) What other methods do social media sites have to generate income e.g. Twitter Blue? 

Under the new system that Musk implemented in 2023, however, checkmarks became a symbol that users had subscribed to X Premium. X Premium subscribers receive benefits including editable posts, fewer ads, longer posts, and more robust security measures. This service costs $8 per month or $84 per year.

Regulation of social media

Read this BBC News article on a report recommending social media regulation. Answer the following questions:

1) What suggestions does the report make? Pick out three you think are particularly interesting. 

- Social networks should be required to release details of their algorithms and core functions to trusted researchers, in order for the technology to be vetted.

- Adding "friction" to online sharing, to prevent the rampant spread of disinformation

- A "statutory building code", which describes mandatory safety and quality requirements for digital platforms.

2) Who is Christopher Wylie? 

Christopher Wylie is a British-Canadian consultant who is known for being the whistleblower who released a cache of documents to The Guardian he obtained while he worked at Cambridge Analytica. 

3) What does Wylie say about the debate between media regulation and free speech? 

In most Western democracies, you do have the freedom of speech. But freedom of speech is not an entitlement to reach. You are free to say what you want, within the confines of hate speech, libel law and so on. But you are not entitled to have your voice artificially amplified by technology.

These platforms are not neutral environments. Algorithms make decisions about what people see or do not see. Nothing in this report restricts your ability to say what you want. What we're talking about is the platform's function of artificially amplifying false and manipulative information on a wide scale.

4) What is ‘disinformation’ and do you agree that there are things that are objectively true or false? 

Disinformation is false information deliberately spread to deceive people. In my opinion, there is definitely a sense of objective truth that is threatened by fake news and disinformation's ability to spread through social media.

5) Why does Wylie compare Facebook to an oil company? 

An oil company would say: "We do not profit from pollution." Pollution is a by-product - and a harmful by-product. Regardless of whether Facebook profits from hate or not, it is a harmful by-product of the current design and there are social harms that come from this business model.

6) What does it suggest a consequence of regulating the big social networks might be? 

Platforms that monetise user engagement have a duty to their users to make at least a minimum effort to prevent clearly identified harms. I think it's ridiculous that there's more safety consideration for creating a toaster in someone's kitchen, than for platforms that have had such a manifest impact on our public health response and democratic institutions.

7) What has Instagram been criticised for?

This is a product of a platform that is making recommendations to you. These algorithms work by picking up what you engage with and then they show you more and more of that. In the report, we talk about a "cooling-off period". You could require algorithms to have a trigger that results in a cooling-off period for a certain type of content. If it has just spent the past week showing you body-building ads, it could then hold off for the next two weeks. If you want to promote body building, you can. But from the user's perspective, they should not be constantly bombarded with a singular theme.

8) Can we apply any of these criticisms or suggestions to Taylor Swift? For example, should Taylor Swift have to explicitly make clear when she is being paid to promote a company or cause? 

Due to the immense scale of her fame, I think it is responsible for Taylor Swift to state when she is being sponsored or has a deal with a company as her large fanbase are highly influenced by the content she posts.