Taylor Swift follows Alexander the Great’s ambition to conquer music world

Might Taylor Swift be pop music’s Alexander the Great? Her power in the music industry has established an empire.

Taylor Swift is out to conquer streaming.

Might Taylor Swift be pop music’s Alexander the Great? Her power in the music industry is undeniable; she has built a vast empire and amassed great riches. She and Adele are the only two superstars who still can sell enormous amounts of music on CD. Her last tour was the second highest grossing last year.

Now she is seeking to conquer a new world: streaming.

There was a period when Swift was at war with streaming ser­vices. In 2014 she withdrew her back catalogue from Spotify. In 2015 she forced Apple to pay artists for music played during users’ three-month free trial period by threatening to pull her album called 1989. She returned her music to Spotify in June 2017, but when she released Reputation in November 2017 she waited three weeks before making it available to stream to maximise physical and download sales.

Her seventh album, Lover, was released on streaming services and in physical form simultaneously on August 23. Why did Swift relent? The first answer is probably that she had won all her battles.

While Spotify’s royalty rates are never going to match those from physical sales, it can still generate tremendous revenue for popular artists. And, on signing to Universal last year, Swift was promised that when the company sold its stake in Spotify, it would distribute the money to its artists, without that payment being counted against any debts they had to the label. She had taken on those she felt were penalising musicians and she had beaten them. Now was the time to ally with her former foes.

The second answer is that, even for Swift, physical sales are declining. Both 1989 and Reputation sold more than one million copies in the US in their first week of release; but while 1989 reached two million in three weeks, it took Reputation 18 weeks to reach the same total.

While many industry observers do not expect Lover to match the physical sales of its predecessors, it is already the biggest album of the year in the US. Within two days Lover had recorded the largest first-week sales of any album since, well, Reputation, with about 500,000 copies sold. The album has performed well on streaming services, too. Last month, Swift held 14 of the top 15 spots on Spotify’s American chart. In Spotify’s global chart she had five songs in the top 20 and a total of 11 in the top 40. Lover also broke the record for the highest number of streams of a new album on Amazon Music.

That suggests a third reason, the Alexander the Great theory: that Swift wanted to conquer streaming as she had physical music and live performance. Before now, her commercial power has not translated to dominance of streaming, a situation not helped by her albums being unavailable for long periods or not available immediately on streaming platforms. In 2017 when she released Reputation, though she sold 2.2 million albums, she chalked up only 1.3 billion streams, whereas Drake achieved 5.9 billion streams against just over 600,000 sales. In 2017, streaming accounted for 54 per cent of music consumption, according to Nielsen Music; now that figure is 80 per cent. There are still worlds to conquer.