Podcasting Taylor

Abstract

Music podcasts use a variety of listening modes to draw non-musically trained listeners into close readings of songwriting, production, and reception. Taylor Swift has attracted the attention of music podcasters who have devoted individual episodes and entire serial podcast to topics ranging from her celebrity feuds and well-publicized relationships, her autobiographical and deeply referential song texts, her savvy branding strategies and relationships with fans, and her public rejoinders to music industry inequities, such as her Taylor’s Version re-recordings. In the case of several Swift podcasts, these expert listeners are also avid fans, challenge the stereotype that avid pop fans are only amateur listeners. Her fans, notably those who self-identify as Swifties, are also active podcasters. This article is about listening to the sonic environments of fan-driven podcasting and the sonic spaces of fandom through music podcasting. This article engages with the sound and content of fan-driven music podcasting and the listening techniques used by hosts to listen to both the music of the artist where their fandom is centered, as well as the paramusical elements of their star persona and sonic strategies used by hosts to shape a virtual sonic environment where listeners listen with and through the hosts’ embodied listening. Through two case studies, The Swift Talk and Switched on Pop, I demonstrate how fan-driven Swift podcasting is sonically constructed and approaches listening as an inclusive social, analytic, and embodied practice of communicating fan musical knowledge to produce new insights into how listening, songwriting, star persona, and fandom are articulated in fan podcasting.