Taylor Swift vs Spotify: What To Do When Fans Talk Behind Your Back
Who controls their message better, a multibillion dollar company or the lady who crashed their site?
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The Incident: Spotify Goes Down
What happened to Spotify when Taylor Swift broke it recently? And what goes on in the heart of a company like Spotify when they completely lose contact with their community at the worst possible time? It can cause disaster, and every company reacts differently.
First, I’ll answer the question. Pop music giant Taylor Swift re-released her most popular album, Red, on the music streaming giant and it immediately crashed. Frustrated people took to social media, where they complained that they couldn’t use the site they paid to use.
Fans were extra antsy because Swift remastered Red as part of a fight with her record label. She mastered the album her way and released it on her terms. Emotions were high. She stretched a song about her first serious heartbreak, All Too Well, into a 10-minute confessional. The moment all these emotions were about to peak, the record disappeared. No one could listen.
Who can truly know the heart of a music streaming company? No one. But we do know that watching people get vocal about a problem you have, with no way to do anything about it, is a corporate nightmare scenario.
On the Internet, a person or company’s message is their whole identity. It’s their ego. In the eyes of someone making money online, to lose control of the way others talk about you is to lose control of your body.
Like most people, you may see this any say “Actually, you can’t really control other people and what they say about you.” It seems like the world’s most efficient recipe for misery, right? Philosophers have always said so.
But it’s not completely impossible to control how other people shape your message. If it were, advertising wouldn’t exist.
Also if it were, we would see far more Justine Saccos. Sacco was the woman who tweeted an offensive joke about white privilege in 2013, then turned off her Internet and got on a plane. When she landed, she reconnected and found the entire Internet had taken her joke the worst way possible, sent her name viral, and that her company had to fire her. The right response would almost definitely defuse the bomb she’d planted under herself, but the message was literally out of her hands.
Likewise, online brands control how people talk by keeping a close handle on the media and having their spokespeople work at all hours. Every little move they make online is designed to control the message. In marketing and PR, this phrase comes up often because it’s the root of a company’s success.
So how does a major company like Spotify defy the philosophers and control the way people talk? And what can a company or person do when that power suddenly vanishes at the worst time?
The Spotify method of social proof
Like anything or anyone attached to billions of dollars, Spotify crafts its public image with precision and a large entourage of master marketers.
Spotify’s current image is dripping with social proof, using society’s favourite people to look cool. They bought out the biggest podcaster and regular Shoot the Message case study Joe Rogan. They post exclusive publicity photos of stars with no mention of who they are, letting the commenters explain for them. They’re in the know, they’re the inner circle. Spotify has the whole scoop and they want you to see proof of that. Right now, the first sentence you see when you visit Spotify’s Twitter is ‘Listening is everything’. I love irony.
Then there’s the emotion and ubiquity of being Spotify, which brings joy to the world through music. After a few times using it, whatever music makes you feel, Spotify makes you feel. So if, say, the music vanished for a bit and was only replaced by Twitter reactions, how would that look?
Oh dear. It could be a lot worse, people are just as likely to go with intense anger. Instead, the top tweets were memeable jokes at Spotify’s expense. Bad for the brand, but there’s a silver lining they could take advantage of if they were to bounce back and talk about the outage. This way, Spotify could include itself in the joke. Good messaging relies on letting an audience in on the bonding session that is the brand’s community.
So what did they say? Nothing? Oh well, maybe they’ll survive this one.
Then surely a pop giant like Taylor Swift won’t court controversy on the tail of this inconvenience, right?
Oh right, that’s her whole thing.
Just after the outage, Swift re-launched the re-released Red. She regularly releases songs about her exes which then become celebrity beefs and promote her explosively. And the 10-minute All Too Well has some seriously venomous accusations about a fellow celebrity.
Something fascinating is happening here: many fans think she went too far, with many comments on Twitter and Reddit along the lines of ‘It happened 10 years ago and she’s still talking about him’. And while this part of the fanbase think the song is unfair and toxic, a fringe of her fans are now harassing the subject of the song and his sister.
Since Swift is a celebrity, this bad publicity will probably do her good in the long-term, but what about the effect on Spotify?
It’s a classic axiom in marketing that all publicity is profitable for celebrities, but only good publicity is profitable for companies. This, for example, is why Elon Musk grows his cult of celebrity when he says something disastrous, even as it sends Tesla stock tumbling.
And how did Spotify react?
Over the weekend and beyond, Spotify played it safe. All its tweets after Red’s release are little promos for new albums that name and tag the popstars, including graphics of the most-listened tracks.
It seems to have just taken the blows and let the issue, and their fans, blow over ... to Pandora.
If Spotify is using the drama in any way, it’s in the one exception to this: a subtle poll that brings back the social proof.
This is super smooth. Everything has been calculated, including each word, the time Spotify released it, and the format. The message here is that Spotify expects any publicity to be good for them, and that it wants to be your cool friend. It wants to be seen riding the celebrity reputation, but it knows it’ll never get away with as much. But it’s banking on you not knowing that.
So what about celebrity? How does Swift shape up to Spotify at controlling the message?
In short, she’s many times better at it. Part of this is because Taylor Swift is better positioned to put out an edgy message, and have people believe what she puts out. She’s one person, not a faceless company. She’s an artist. And that one person regularly spills her guts to fans, including her ex-partners’ secrets.
Where Spotify gives little in-jokes like making polls out of Swift lyrics or posting pictures of a star without naming them, Swift creates the jokes by hiding messages in Instagram posts and the lyric sheets of her albums. Because she’s creating art, this doesn’t feel like an ad, even when it is.
You’re probably also thinking about the other big distinction: a celebrity can get in trouble in a way that a company can’t. But that doesn’t apply here. Swift borrows one big element from her roots in Country and Western music: she is extremely real in her most famous songs. Yes, it’s all a carefully sculpted personal brand and no fan knows the real Taylor Swift. But the one in the songs gets far more personal than other stylised popstars are brave enough to do.
In short, Swift shows how the average person can control their message: when you want people to talk, don’t give a complete message. When you want them to express emotion for you, give them your own emotion. If you want to be believed, respect your congruence and its beauty. Let people see your genuine side over and over, so that they go from saying “That was really honest” to “This is an honest person.”
I don’t recommend you then use that power to smear all your exes, but you will get away with it if you don’t overdo it -- or if you make like Swift and trash talk so enjoyably that everyone knows dating you will end with them in a song. You’ll never be happy in love, but people will like listening to you.
Companies can control their message like Swift, but they need to do it with a face, like when a CEO apologises in person. But they get it wrong far more often than they get it right, namely when they’re not actually sorry, because the hypersocial homo sapiens can spot a lie like a falcon spots prey.
Spotify didn’t hurt themselves disastrously by pushing on without talking about the outage, but they did miss a chance to pick themselves back up right away. They could’ve stuck with the Swift theme and expressed honest frustration, or just made another meme with lyrics. It would’ve gotten them in the news.
Next time, maybe. For a global streaming giant like Spotify, there will be a next time.
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