On being an academic Taylor Swift expert
This post was originally published on my Medium page on 30/6/23.
The very nature of academic research is that most people have an extremely niche speciality. A lot of the time, that speciality will only be relevant in a tiny context that a majority of people are never truly aware of. However, every now and again, something happens that makes the wider public go “oh! that’s what you study”. Often, this is rooted in tragedy or crisis. We saw it with the epidemiologists during the height of the COVID pandemic, and just last week we heard from experts on submersibles after the Titan wreck. Sometimes research is specifically tied to policy and appears in the news when there’s a bill introduced in parliament or a societal moment that leads to calls for further investigation by those in power.
If you’re me, the moment comes when Taylor Swift concert tickets go on sale.
I began studying Taylor Swift in 2018, and over the past five years have been met with reactions ranging from “that’s cool” to “huh. they really do let you study anything these days”.
When I say I study Taylor Swift, I don’t mean I wrote an 80,000-word thesis solely on her, but her fandom was one of two case studies in my examination of fan engagement with commodified celebrity fandom communities. I was interested in how and why fans spend money, and how it connects to the sense of community they find within fandom spaces. I surveyed and interviewed her fans, heavily researched her marketing tactics, and applied a significant amount of sociological theory to explain things like her secret sessions, her frequent merch drops, and just why so many of us have spent over half of our lives being her fan and being desperate to meet her.
Because I, too, am a Swiftie. I fell in love with her music as a fourteen-year-old in 2008 when I heard Love Story for the first time, and now as a twenty-nine-year-old, she has remained my most-played artist on Spotify every year that I’ve had an account. As half of the methods chapter of my thesis explains, I didn’t choose to study Taylor because I am a fan, but being a fan helped me initially identify the trends I wanted to study and then gain the trust of my research participants who appreciated that I related to their passion.
I last saw Taylor in October 2019. I was lucky enough to be one of the few people who got to see her perform songs from Lover before the pandemic cancelled further tour plans and led to the release of folklore and evermore.
When Australian dates for the Eras tour were announced last week, my first two thoughts were “holy shit I need tickets” and “oh my god it is finally time for my research to shine”. I jumped out of bed and ran to my laptop to pitch an article to The Conversation, which I then spent the first four hours of my day writing in between doing my actual job. After the article was published later that day, I shared it across my networks and hoped that a media outlet or two would ask me for some expert commentary.
It’s a weird thing to say, but I am an expert on Taylor Swift.
While fans know a lot about her life and career, I am one of the few people (if not the only person) who has studied her fandom in-depth, especially as it pertains to the extreme demand for concert tickets.
I have had many conversations this week with people who have told me they finally understand what it is that I study, and why I chose to study it. While I’ve tried to explain the relevance of my field over the years (that’s a post for another day!), it really does take a big, societal moment for people to understand that I didn’t just choose it for fun, but rather because it speaks to the very nature of our modern cultural world.
After today’s general public ticket sale (which I am once again entering the hell of the ticket queue for, as even though my parents are my heroes and managed to snag me a ticket on Wednesday, my brother now wants to go), the relevance of my research will once again fade until Taylor hits our shores in February (and perhaps not even then). But I don’t mind the flash-in-the-pan nature of people understanding what it is I do, because I am glad that even for a moment it was relevant. Our world is so focused on STEM-based education that the humanities and social sciences are often discarded, with the study of celebrities and fandom then at the bottom of that discarded pile. And if I can even briefly show that there is value in what I study, that I contribute to the understanding of society, the pain of the ticket-buying process that kicked all of this off will have been worth it.