If you don’t know who Taylor Swift is, read on. If you do know who Taylor Swift is, read on too. You never know, there might be something new about Swift here for you to find out.

What do Taylor Swift and AI have in common? More than you might imagine. For a start, Taylor Swift was outraged when deepfake nudes of her were circulated earlier this year. Funnily enough, she featured in the Black Box Guardian podcast I referred to last week – in a podcast on the truly horrible app ‘ClothOff’.

ClothOff will visually remove the clothing from any image of a female provided. The Guardian journalist asked the faceless employees of the company what the purpose of ClothOff is. They replied, “To make people feel less ashamed of nudity.” How come only women need to feel less ashamed?

ClothOff came to light when a Spanish teenager told her gynacologist mother about fake pictures circulating at school, including of the teenager. The investigation broadened across the world, finding deepfake nudes in many countries and trying to discover who is behind ClothOff. The Guardian never got to the bottom of it, but there were many layers of companies and eastern European entrepreneurs and black market money involved.

However, Clothoff is not the only commonality between TayTay and AI. They are both everywhere. The start of my discovery of TayTay everywhere was when my song writing teacher suggested I could provide a review of Taylor Swift’s latest album – The Tortured Poet’s Department. It’s a double album and my teacher figured I had lots of walking time to listen to all 31 songs.

I do have a lot of walking time, but I struggled to get through the entire album – how many songs about heartbreak can one fifty-eight-year old listen to? Thirty-one is decidedly too many. Do I really care that TayTay’s heart was broken over a two week fling with some guy somewhere (Fortnight, the first song on the album)? It did cross my mind that maybe I should have had more failed relationships so I could write more songs of my own about heartbreak. I concluded I should not have – I will never be as famous as TayTay and I’d have had a lot of bad times if I’d been practising relationships with the frequency she appears to have. Her average time with a partner might rival Liz Truss’s prime ministership and the lifetime of a lettuce.

Far beyond influencing my songwriting class, Taylor Swift could be one of the most visible and influential people on the planet. According to the Economist, Taylor Swift’s actions have a major influence on the American election campaign. According to a friend, her actions are likely included in financial calculations of hedge funds. According to a biography of the USD8.8 billion implosion of cryptoking Sam Bankman Fried’s empire, he had a deal lined up to pay Swift USD15 million per annum to refer to his FTX crypto trading platform every so often. TayTay was keen but Sam forgot to sign the deal before he went bankrupt so it never happened.

Forbes announced Taylor Swift as a billionaire in 2024. Part of this is her ubiquitous presence in streamed music. Eighteen percent of the  most streamed tracks on Spotify are TayTay's. Despite Spotify only paying artists 0.003 cents per stream, as the top streamed artist in 2023 she made $131 million from Spotify. She actually took all her music off Spotify in 2014 in protest at the tiny amounts artists are paid but caved in 2017.

According to the results of a survey conducted in the United States in October 2023, about 33 percent of 30-44 year old respondents said they considered themselves Taylor Swift fans. It's an even sex split, 52% of fans were female and 48% male. Racially,  74% of the fans were white, 13% Black, 9% Asian, and 4% from other races. Politically, 55% of the fans were Democrats , 23% Republican and 23% independent. 45% are millennials, 23% Baby Boomers, 21% Generation X and 11% Generation Z. The ‘senior Swifties’ – from boomers and Generation X – are rapidly increasing with more than 10% of survey respondents over 65 being fans. Academics and journalists study Swifties (a term Taylor has trademarked); I imagine marketers do too given she has 550 million social media followers. That's 1/16 of the planet's population, including babies.

So what did I think of the Tortured Poet’s Department? I think I prefer songs about heartbreak sung by people with voices more like Gin Wigmore’s – she sounds like heartbreak. Taylor's songs are fine but I don’t need to listen to thirty-one relatively similar songs about the same topic. I also think it doesn’t matter what I think. No one’s opinion matters when someone has 100s of millions of fans. Now, how long before AI gets onto the job and we have thousands, or millions, of Taylor Swift sing-alike songs to listen to? That’ll keep all those Swifties busy when they walk across the southern coast of Spain.