Lana, Taylor and anti-institutional realignment Recently, I watched the Grammys and learned more about Lana Del Rey. I had no idea she was friendly with Taylor Swift, or that she and Taylor shared the same producer. These women have been pop stars for over a decade: Taylor the… Show more

That’s why I loved her decision to pull out of Spotify. Taylor Swift is not some sort of Luddite futilely standing against the forces of modernity; rather, she is a highly differentiated content creator capturing the immense value she is creating instead of ceding it to an aggregator that treats every piece of content the same.

It’s hard to see history when you’re in the middle of it, harder still to distinguish Swift’s impact on the culture from her celebrity, which emits so much light it can be blinding. But something unusual is happening with Swift, without a contemporary precedent. She deploys the most efficient medium of the day—the pop song—to tell her story. Yet ov... See more

To understand how we got here, it’s important to know Roan’s perilous journey, encompassing all big three major labels. Born in Missouri and raised in a conservative Christian household, she was signed to Warner’s Atlantic Records and positioned as the next Lorde after a video of her 2017 single “Die Young” went viral, and moved to L.A. to pursue h... See more