Dear writers and creatives,
Were you listening when Taylor Swift told the heartbreaking story about getting her masters back? I don’t know about you, but I felt that pain in my bones. I wouldn’t call myself a Swiftie, but hearing the back story was a powerful reminder that even our most popular artists struggle to control their own work.
I learned so many lessons from Taylor’s journey with her masters. Here are my top 3:
- Trust your audience. People told her that no one would buy re-recorded songs. She did it anyway, and the Taylor’s version of her albums became more popular than the originals. Why? Because she trusted her audience to stick with her and support her.
- Be vulnerable with your struggles. The re-recordings worked because she was transparent about her desire to get her masters back. Her audience didn’t necessarily understand what a master recording was when the journey started. But Taylor consistently shared why it mattered to her and brought us along on the journey.
- Publish on owned media, distribute on rented platforms. Taylor controls her narrative through her website. Any major announcement starts there and publishes out to social media. While Taylor has plenty of social-first content, her big announcements and her album archive microsites all link back to her main website. This is why I won’t move my blog to Substack, and I only published a few blogs on Medium. I want to control the means of production. You can’t do that if Substack decides to kick you off the platform or shuts down.
What Taylor taught me about ownership
I’ve been thinking about this last point a lot lately. If anything, the last lesson taught me to return to my blog in earnest. I’ve decided I want to re-evaluate which platforms I frequent and recommit to writing more.
A few months ago, I started a newsletter, and then promptly quit a few weeks later. I now realize that I tried to do too much too fast. I was hurting and burying the pain in another half-done project. I promise to restart soon, but on a smaller scale.
I recently submitted a flash fiction to a literary magazine, and even though the rejection stung—as all rejections do—I realized that I have more freedom to control the story I tell when I do so here. So, I published Welcome to New York last night.