Joyous Pop-Up Community

The "Swiftie" Phenomenon

You’d have to be living under a rock to be unaware of the movement that is Taylor Swift’s Era tour. I knew her tour was one of the highest grossing and helped local economies, and that she had a legion of loyal fans. I remembered her fantastic SNL opening monologue from 2013, a song she wrote making lighthearted fun of herself with spot-on comedic timing. And I’ve been known to turn up the volume of one of two songs I know, Love Story, when it comes on the radio. Still, I was in the dark about what the commotion was about.  

Here’s a side vignette of an interaction that made me want to understand more about this cultural phenomenon. A month back, my mother and I sat at the bar at Terzo, an Italian restaurant in Minneapolis, for our favorite happy hour. We spoke to a couple next to us who were ordering plate after plate of food, along with expensive wine. They were clearly enjoying themselves and celebrating. They told us they were huge Minnesota Viking fans and had season tickets despite an abysmal season so far. That week, the Vikings were scheduled to play the Kansas City Chiefs, and they got offered obscene amounts of money for the tickets because it was rumored Taylor Swift might be there to watch her boyfriend play. I thought: “Huh?” They happily accepted – Taylor didn’t come.

Curious to learn more about the Taylor effect, I read a great article in The New York Times Magazine by Taffy Brodesser-Akner about the concert she attended at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California (from nosebleed seats).

The journalist explores how Swift set new rules of engagement with the media. For example, she hasn’t done an interview with a major media outlet since 2019 because (the journalist points out) she doesn’t need the media to sell records. Swift is the best storyteller of her story. Most interesting to me is Swift’s level of engagement with her fans, otherwise known as “Swifties”, and the dynamic connections that are made between her fans. 

While the audience consisted primarily of girls (and their chaperones) and young women, the atmosphere was inclusive. Brodesser-Akner describes the ambiance at the arena before the concert began as solemn and almost spiritual. They dressed in outfits from Swift’s various phases or eras and their related albums: For example, as circus ringleaders or cheerleaders or decked out in hooded capes and petticoats. And there was glitter; lots of it.

One of her reflections on what she had experienced was that Swift frees everyone of all ages to celebrate every part of their girlhood. These chapters, or earlier versions of us, should be celebrated, even the ones that were difficult or painful. As an artist famously known to work out her emotional challenges in her songs, Swift models how to honor all eras of our lives. What she writes personally resonates with her legions of fans.

After reading Brodesser-Akner’s piece on the Era concert, I read a few articles focusing on the Swifties. It occurred to me that the tour concerts were a meeting place for a vibrant community between Swift and her fans cultivated throughout her career. This community was not unidirectional, with adoration going solely towards Swift and in return, her bestowing her fabulousness upon them. It was interactive, and the Swifties built creative ways of connecting with each other.

I traveled throughout the country to visit vibrant communities. I wrote a book about what qualities they had in common. Several of those qualities or core values are present in the Swiftie community and at Taylor Swift concerts. Two are an explicit value of caring for each other, along with ritual and celebration. These qualities differentiate vibrant communities from other kinds of gatherings and are what makes the concerts much more than entertainment. I’ll give one example of each, though there are many examples.

Caring for Each Other

Swift is known for her generosity, including giving large bonuses to her crew and donations to food banks where she performs, to her fans in need, and to emergency response services after a natural catastrophe.

Swifties not only have in common their love for Swift’s music, but they also have each other’s backs. A great example is what happened in response to a Ticketmaster debacle, which left throngs of fans signed up for the “verified fan” early access out in the cold and feeling bereft. Swiftie fans with tickets, in a show of tight-knit community empowerment, created a network of spreadsheets and online bulletin boards to facilitate face-value sales and exchanges so that devoted fans could see their hero without getting gouged by the secondary market. Some superfans worked forty hours a week to help arrange deals on tickets for others. One of these fans said their only motive was altruistic enthusiasm. They wanted to look out and be surrounded by people in their community, fans who knew the words to the songs.

Ritual and Celebration

Swift fans have come up with traditions and rituals during her concerts. One that is heartwarming is the exchange of friendship bracelets. Taffy Brodesser-Akner described it: “Around us, stranger approached stranger and held out a wrist full of beaded bracelets that named various Taylor Swift albums, which were here doing business as ‘eras,’ to choose from; stranger took another era off her own wrist and traded it back, a wordless ritual that everyone understood. The stranger was no longer stranger, but friend.” An affirmation of the power of collective ritual is how Levi’s Stadium reversed its policy of not allowing bracelets in preparation for the Swift concert in San Francisco.

Taylor Swift is, of course, enormously talented and gifted. Still, the secret sauce to her over-the-top success is that she has intentionally created authentic relationships with her fans since the beginning. Her concerts are not only an opportunity to connect to her music and to her, but also to each other in a beautiful, pop-up community.

---