Paul Rand: She’s been called the biggest pop star of the century. She has the highest net worth of any female singer. Her fans span across generations and her tours and her albums sell out well, swiftly.

Tape: Welcome to the Eras Tour.

Tape: Taylor Swift is in her history making era. The pop icon officially has the highest grossing music tour ever.

Paula Harper: We can talk about a figure like Taylor Swift as being a cultural architect in that she’s setting up and articulating some norms around things like say, white girlhood or femininity in the 21st century.

Paul Rand: That’s Paula Harper, Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Chicago. She researches music, sound and the internet, and also co-edited the first academic book about Taylor Swift.

Paula Harper: I generally say, “No, don’t call me a Swiftie. Call me a Taylor Swift scholar, perhaps a Swift scholar.” And in part, I think that that’s because as somebody who’s researching, especially the Taylor Swift fandom, I’m really, really aware of the particularities of being a Swiftie and of the encyclopedic knowledge that the kinds of work that Swifties are doing, which is different and distinct from the kinds of work that I am doing as an academic.

Paul Rand: Harper is interested in how music circulates on digital platforms and how gender, fandom, sound, and media intersect. And she says artists like Swift, as well as Beyonce, whose fame grew along with their social media followings, have been compelling case studies for studying popular music today.

Paula Harper: These stars are virtuosic in working to navigate digital media really, really savvily. Being really, really cognizant of how audio visuality works online. So, I’m thinking about the Beyonce visual album as something that was really, really a declaration of virtuosic understanding of how audiovisual media circulates online.

The fact that a visual album would be well received in the mid-2010s platform ecosystem, the fact that every song needed to have a video with it at that moment and that the videos were going to be parsed and remixed right, or on the other hand, somebody like Taylor Swift, who has been engaged with social media since the very, very beginnings of her career.

Paul Rand: Harper is also working on a book about virality, what makes a song or a sound go viral, and how artists are leveraging social media platforms like TikTok or Instagram to become an overnight success.

Paula Harper: I’m really interested in artists who are performing on platforms like TikTok or platforms like Instagram. They’re not just using that as a space for promotion. They’re not expecting their listeners to move off of that platform. Maybe go to Spotify or catch them in concert or something, but that they’re really thinking about crafting music for performance on these short form video sites or platforms. And I think that there’s something really interesting about that.

Paul Rand: And in today’s music ecosystem, there’s even more competition for artists to go viral on social media, especially as AI-generated music is now filling our feeds, which begs the question, could the next big pop star or the next viral hit be AI-generated?

Paula Harper: I think as we’re recording this right now, the big news story in my ecosystem is that number one at the top of the country digital downloads chart is a song that is at least in part AI-generated. It’s a song called Walk My Walk by the AI-generated band, Breaking Rust, by not being coy about this, by saying like, “Well, yeah, you know what? We do have a platform full of AI music.” I think that it’s only encouraging people to further devalue streaming music.

Paul Rand: From the University of Chicago Podcast Network, welcome to Big Brains, where we explore the groundbreaking research and the discoveries that are transforming our world. I’m your host, Paul Rand. Join me as we meet the minds behind the breakthroughs on today’s episode, The Science of Viral Music, and the Forces Driving Today’s Fandom.

Today’s episode of Big Brains is supported by the Court Theatre, Hyde Park’s Tony Award-winning theater located on the University of Chicago campus. Here, timeless stories speak to today’s world. From Sophocles to Tom Stoppard, Caryl Churchill to Anton Chekhov, and August Wilson to Tennessee Williams. When you’re at Court Theatre, you know you’re going to see something bold and provocative, something that will move you and make you think.

You know you’re going to get a great theatrical experience unlike anything else, one that only could happen on the south side of Chicago. Reimagine what classic theater can be. Visit Court Theatre, that’s Court T-H-E-A-T-R-E.org. I wonder if I can take us all back to the beginning to really understand the significance of what it is that you’re studying, and that is sound and why sound has always been such a powerful cultural force.

Paula Harper: You’ve given me an absolutely enormous question here, but I’m going to answer it from the vantage of my research. So, I am currently finishing up a book about virality, things going viral online. And one of the starting points for me is exactly a version of this question that you’ve just asked, just thinking about what kinds of affordances and capacities music is carrying with it, music bears that it brings to the digital age.

And so, music is something that has a lot of baggage or connotations, generally speaking, pretty positive. We think about, oftentimes, we talk sometimes in my world about musical exceptionalism, that when people invoke music, they’re generally doing it in a positive way. Positive connotations about bringing people together, about uniting them, the metaphors of harmony, unison.

And we think about the kinds of collectivity that music can engender, people coming together to make music, to put their voices or instruments together in ways that are pleasurable, that feel good, that sound good, the pleasure of music in your body, but that also music has capacities that can be a little bit trickier or more ambivalent than that, right? So, sound is something that can exceed boundaries.

Paul Rand: When we talk about it being a cultural force, how do you explain that and why that is actually so important?

Paula Harper: Just the experience of going to a live concert, something that my students frequently talk about under the Durkheim frame of collective effervescence, really putting their core to use there. But thinking about the way that, yeah, you go to a Taylor Swift concert, say, you go to a massive stadium filled with other people who are all engaging in the same physical activities as you.

Paul Rand: You got a shared experience together.

Paula Harper: Yeah. Shared experience. You might be singing along, you’re all syncing up your breath and your heartbeat, you’re doing the same thing with your bodies. There’s a real thrill in that.

Paul Rand: Is there some monumental moment when you look at it and say whether it was, maybe if there was, perhaps it was certainly the internet, but was there something digital or something beforehand that really began the era that we’re currently in?

Paula Harper: I do think the internet, the ‘90s, but especially early 2000s internet, the peer-to-peer file sharing, Napster era, technicities of the internet is a really important shift in, maybe in the formal properties of music, but I think it’s certainly a huge shift in terms of the economic functioning of music industries and then the way that that’s in dialogue with social formations around music and its circulation, as well as ideas about music and musical value, musical commodities and how we value those and how that in turn relates to things like compensation for a variety of folks who are involved in it, right?

So, I think there’s a massive shift that is technological, that is economic, that happens in the early internet era with the peer-to-peer file sharing affordances that get built out there that has a massive amount to do with the current situation that we are in. If we think about streaming, the domination of something like Spotify and Apple Music, even, I think, some of the roots of like AI music and the AI music ecosystem that is on the rise right now, that I think there’s a way in which we can trace a huge amount of that too, the changes that are ushered in the peer-to-peer file sharing and the Napster era.

And so, there are a lot of people who are doing really great work right now on, say, Spotify, on music platforms, on spaces that are explicitly music or on genres like say hyper pop, things that feel really A, explicitly musical and B, specific to the digital ecosystem in which we find ourselves. And I am more fascinated by things that are a little bit more eccentrically defined as music, things that people might say, “Is that really music? Are we really talking about music here?”

So, I’m more interested in edge cases or fringe cases. So, obviously Spotify, I think most people would agree that that’s a music platform, but is TikTok a music platform? Is Twitter a music platform? I once had a student asked, is LinkedIn a music platform? I haven’t considered that one yet.

Paul Rand: I’ve never heard that, but OK, yes.

Paula Harper: I haven’t dug into it enough to think about it, right? But so, with this expanded concept of thinking about music, not as a noun, but as a verb, as something that involves collections of people doing stuff, I think that that really helps me think about a lot of the things that are happening online, specifically these explosions of virality, which I see as people really engaged in something.

Paul Rand: So, you talked a little bit earlier about how sound and music was shaping and guiding culture, but now there’s a whole new game in town and I wonder if you can talk about what’s at stake when algorithms and platforms are really arguably helping decide which sounds and which ideas and which music gets amplified. What are we gaining from that? And maybe even as importantly, what are we losing?

Paula Harper: There have always been folks who are making decisions that impact what kinds of music certain audiences have access to, what kinds of music is getting a lot of airplay and what kinds of music isn’t, thinking about genre divisions around race lines in the early periods of the American music industry. So, there have always been sets of people making decisions and institutions making decisions about what is available to be listened to under a mass media music industry regime.

Here, as you point out, that we are in a space that feels different, distinct, more intensified, and I think part of that is absolutely true. I think part of it is also a feeling that when say, the world of this like Napster and beyond world of digital music, that that was oftentimes framed across the 2000s and 2010s as this real, liberatory, democratizing turn of offense, that this was something that was knocking down, that was eroding these gatekeeping structures, that this wasn’t going to be the case anymore. We were entering a new era where we weren’t going to have those kinds of forces making those decisions for audiences.

And now, we are in a space where, in some ways, it feels like those decisions are more overdetermined than ever in ways where maybe when we’re thinking about the mid-century or late 20th century music industry ecosystem with radio play and payola, we’re thinking about the music industry, various music industry players instantiating a monoculture, right? Everyone is listening to X because that’s who’s getting played on the radio and that’s what we have access to.

Whereas now, we’re in the reverse situation. Certainly, there are still some artists who are gaining huge amounts, maybe outsized amounts of attention, one of whom is somebody that I have written about, Taylor Swift.

Paul Rand: Yeah, we’ll talk about that.

Paula Harper: Which we’ll talk about, but we also have this situation in which it feels like that those decisions that are being made, not by the listeners themselves, but by corporate interests, feel like they are rather than collectivizing that they’re isolating, that I’m listening to this playlist that Spotify has curated for me, that is nothing like the playlist, that somebody very close to me is listening to.

And I think that that could be exciting and liberatory, but I think that there are a number of reasons why people understand it to be anxiety-inducing, have a variety of negative reactions to that being the situation, to Spotify and its algorithms being in control of curation in a very different way than curation was happening in say the ‘60s or the ‘80s or the ‘90s even.

Paul Rand: And so, if you said, “Here’s the biggest thing I’m concerned about this ‘curation’ happening through the platforms and algorithms and so forth,” what things about that are the most troubling to you?

Paula Harper: I mean, I think that one of the things that I’m deeply concerned about is just musicians getting paid, that the Spotify model, the streaming model is not viable for musicians. Musicians effectively cannot make a living through the circulation of their music on these platforms and there’s not really a route for them to make a... The musical commodity that existed in say the LP or the tape cassette or the CD, that doesn’t exist anymore, nor is there like a norm around purchase of musical commodities that provides payment to artists.

But I do think that, to me, one of just the biggest issues is that there’s not an ecosystem where artists can make a living off of their music. And that is, to me, a fundamental problem and leads to an ecosystem where it just makes it more possible for say, Spotify to fill their musical archives with, say, AI-generated music because if musicians aren’t able, if human musicians aren’t able to make a living off of this, they are less likely to be doing so. And so, the possibility of a future landscape filled with just AI-generated music that you’re meant to have on in the background.

Paul Rand: I hadn’t thought about it. It makes all the sense in the world. Let me change gears on you a little bit and I want to go back into our current times and maybe for lack of a better word, pop star times. And it wasn’t that long ago when somebody, and it may have been you or there’s others, that started deciding that Taylor Swift was worthy of studying from an academic point of view.

And so, you talk about Taylor Swift and arguably Beyonce, as being more than pop stars. And you talk about them being, if this is the right word, cultural architects. And tell me what you mean by that, that they are cultural architects.

Paula Harper: I would say that, yes, I was in a bit of the vanguard of academics studying Taylor Swift, academics taking Taylor Swift seriously, but that that is the media framing, the discursive kerfuffles that you suggest or that you point to there, that this is the same kind of thing that people were doing when people started talking about Beyonce, but you can find people saying this about classes about the Beatles or classes about Madonna.

So, on the one hand, it’s like, yeah, I was in a group of the first folks who were spending a lot of, who were saying like, “Hey, why aren’t we talking about Taylor Swift in the way that we’ve already been talking about Beyonce or these other figures?” And I think that those figures then can become avatars for a whole host of other things that are not explicitly musical and that maybe are pretty far away from music.

So, I think maybe closer in, we can talk about a figure like Taylor Swift as being a cultural architect in that she’s setting up and articulating some norms around things like say, white girlhood or femininity in the 21st century or how to perform a certain political affiliation or how to perform a certain being in the world as somebody engaging in romance and in the contemporary discourse where you’re getting yelled at on the internet maybe.

So, Taylor Swift or a figure like that as this avatar for how to be in the world and that being expressed, again, you drafting on these positive, affective qualities of music, that I’m listening to this and I’m like bopping along with this, but also the celebrity who is giving this to me is providing me an aspirational template for how to exist in the world as whatever.

Paul Rand: Okay. That’s a great way to put it.

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So, it’s hard to think about both of those artists, Taylor Swift and Beyonce and some others without thinking about the sheer brilliance of how they use fandom and virality to build cultural power. And the internet has empowered them to do that to a really significant degree. You’re nodding. So, tell me why you agree with that and expand on that thought, if you would please.

Paula Harper: Yeah. I think it’s not a coincidence that both of these artists are artists who started off very young, who were incredibly professional and professional-minded, very young, and whose careers have spanned this pre to post digital musical world, or at least they’re both figures who were around before the advent of the internet, at least the internet, the social web 2.0 internet as we know it.

So, these are folks who were starting out in and amongst people familiar with the pre-Napster music industry and who got on as early adopters of things like social media and how to perform on social media. Well, Taylor Swift has navigated that, but I would say that among their various virtuosities, these stars are virtuosic in working to navigate digital media really, really savvily, being really, really cognizant of how audiovisuality works online. So, I’m thinking about the Beyonce visual album as something that was really, really a declaration of virtuosic understanding of how audiovisual media circulates online.

The fact that a visual album would be well received in the mid-2010s platform ecosystem, the fact that every song needed to have a video with it at that moment and that the videos were going to be like parsed and remixed or on the other hand, somebody like Taylor Swift, who has been engaged with social media since the very, very beginning of her career. Not just she was notoriously present on the Tumblr platform, but even before that, she was a presence on the MySpace platform. So, this is somebody who is not here in the 2020s thinking like, “Oh, I need to get on TikTok to be relatable.” This is somebody who has...

Paul Rand: Shaped it.

Paula Harper: ... set the tone for what we think of when we think of celebrities and musical celebrities being relatable. And again, we’re thinking about these platforms that are not explicitly musical platforms, but where musical discourse, musical fandom has been happening since way back at the beginnings of the social media platform ecosystem.

Paul Rand: And I’m not sure how this relates to it, but any folks that are listening that have young kids, young daughters, or nieces, nephews, or others, the phenomena of The Eras Tour and the bracelets and the whole experience of going, that on its own really was a pretty profound cultural experience. Why did that work in the moment that it was in?

Paula Harper: I mean, I think absolutely perfect storm that, like I was saying before when I was talking about stadium concerts and collective effervescence and also a post pandemic anxious, ambivalent return to stadium concerts, to live music performance, that this is something where The Era’s Tour similar to Beyonce’s Renaissance tour, those two were happening at the same time, was this massive, again, like avatar for returning to in person concerts post-pandemic lockdowns, that this is something that a lot of people were really thirsty for and excited about and willing to spend huge amounts of time and energy doing.

But then, beyond those who couldn’t spend the huge amounts of, especially money on these tickets, on traveling to these concerts, that we have also this apparatus, which again, has been made robust by even the pandemic. This apparatus of live streaming, a set of expectations about how live streaming works, about how this amplified hybrid, we’re doing this collectively, but we’re doing it digitally as well. How lots and lots of people got much more comfortable with and savvy about those hybrid technologies, that The Eras Tour is launching in the wake of that too.

So, you not just have people who are going to the tours, but you have people who are every night live streaming them, who are watching TikTok live streams, who are watching live streams on Twitch or other streaming platforms. So, you get this collectivity that it is maybe fomented by the loss of, or the absence of it in the pandemic, but also is enabled by the technologies that people have built or learned to use more virtuosically to make that collectivity happen again during the pandemic.

Paul Rand: The other thing that really caused a great amount of attention, and I never would believe that I would know who Scooter Braun was, but Scooter Braun became a bit of a villain in a story of ownership and control. And Taylor Swift was a driver in making that all work, and that ties back into that point you were making about people taking charge of their music. Tell me about that experience and why, if you think that was significant, in shaping how music and culture are continuing to evolve.

Paula Harper: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I absolutely think that that is a significant part of the Taylor Swift story. I think that story is indicative of particular virtuosities of Taylor Swift, to be able to communicate to a fan base who presumably does not know that much about the intricacies of say of US musical copyright law, to be able to get them into a space where they’re familiar with some of the ins and outs of that.

Now, this is a very, very useful case study. And I think that Taylor Swift is this conflict with Scooter Braun, the question of buying back her own masters or of not having control of her masters, this is something that has a longer history in pop music that I think a number of like Rockheads might be really familiar with, people like Prince, for example, having massive disputes over masters. So, it connects her with this legacy of artists who are having similar kinds of struggles over authorial control.

And then, it’s also connected, I think, discursively connected, connected in people’s minds to say the MeToo movement of the time. There’s a gendered labor component and a gender dynamic to it. And so, it made for a really compelling narrative for her to buy back her masters as a success that many fans felt as though they were participants in.

Paul Rand: Yeah, I think you’re right.

Paula Harper: That they are, again, to put it in economic terms, but terms that I’ve seen people use, that they’re stakeholders in Taylor Swift Inc. and that their purchases, their fan purchases, their purchases of multiple variants of her album or tickets to her concerts or her merch, that these contribute to this project of returning her masters to her, of allowing her to purchase them back. So, the way that she-

Paul Rand: So, as I listen to you on this, you sound like a Taylor Swift fan. Would you consider yourself, what’s the word, a Swiftie?

Paula Harper: I feel like I have to answer this all the time.

Paul Rand: I’m sure you do.

Paula Harper: I generally say, no, don’t call me a Swiftie, call me a Taylor Swift scholar, perhaps, a Swift scholar. And in part, I think that that’s because as somebody who’s researching, especially the Taylor Swift fandom, I’m really, really aware of the particularities of being a Swiftie...

Paul Rand: Got it.

Paula Harper: ... and of the encyclopedic knowledge that the kinds of work that Swifties are doing, which is different and distinct from the kinds of work that I am doing as an academic.

Paul Rand: Got you. I want to go back to this point and I hadn’t really spent much time thinking about it, but this idea where AI is generating music and how it’s shaping, and I think we’ve gotten to this point where platforms, of course, are not just distributing sound, they clearly are shaping what we hear. They’re shaping what we believe. And I wonder if you can talk about how this feedback loop is influencing culture and arguably even politics.

Paula Harper: Yeah. So, I think as we’re recording this right now, a big news story in my ecosystem is that number one at the top of the country digital downloads chart is a song that is, at least in part, AI-generated. It’s a song called, Walk My Walk by the AI-generated band Breaking Rust.

Paul Rand: So, can you explain it? It’s not a real band?

Paula Harper: Yeah. So, it is a band in the sense that in a Spotify metadata sense, in that it is an artist in Spotify’s terms that you can click on and that has songs, but these songs are, again, at least in part, but perhaps entirely AI-generated. And I think that there are also possibilities, this specter of what if we get massive AI-generated artists, what if they’re taking over the top of the charts like this?

And again, this specter of robots taking our jobs in a spectacular way, what if pop stars get replaced by robots? But I think that the more mundane reality is that it’s not necessarily pop stars. I think that there’s still probably going to be a winner take all, massive pop stars as real humans reality, but that it’s the more ... the songs that are less spectacularly explosive on the Spotify platform and that it’s songs that are filling out playlists.

And I think that encouraging by not being coy about this, by saying like, “Well, yeah, you know what? We do have a platform full of AI music,” I think that it’s only encouraging people to further devalue streaming.

Paul Rand: As we look toward the future, and I think your discussion about AI-generated music is certainly something that I have every confidence we’re going to be seeing more of, are there other big shifts in online sound and music that we should be expecting, seeing, even being concerned about or excited about?

Paula Harper: I think something that has already become a shift, a shift that we have already undertaken, is a shift towards music that is designed and native to a short form video ecosystem. So, people have already talked about music is shorter these days, which I think is quantitatively true that the average length of pop songs or songs in the billboard chart is shorter now than it was at times past. But I also think that I’m really interested in artists who are performing on platforms like TikTok or platforms like Instagram.

They’re not just using that as a space for promotion, they’re not expecting their listeners to move off of that platform, maybe go to Spotify or catch them in concert or something, but that they’re really thinking about crafting music for performance on these short form video sites or platforms. And I think that there’s something really interesting about that, that those songs oftentimes are not just shorter, but they’re different in terms of their form.

I think that they’re different in terms of content so that there’s a whole little ecosystem of musical genres that are happening outside of the standard music industry, genre space, and even the Spotify genre space that these short form video platforms have made it possible for really new kinds of music to emerge in a way that I find really fascinating.

Lea Ceasrine: Big Brains is a production of the University of Chicago Podcast Network and sponsored by the Graham School. Are you a lifelong learner with an insatiable curiosity? Access more than 50 open enrollment courses every quarter. Learn more at graham.uchicago.edu/bigbrains. And if you like what you heard in our podcast, please leave us a rating and review. The show is hosted by Paul M. Rand and produced by me, Lea Ceasrine, with help by Eric Fey. Thanks for listening.