101 Taylor Swift

Post your links to colleges and or universities that are offering classes about Taylor Swift in the comments.

CNN - August 25, 2022 -
The University of Texas is offering a class on the songs of Taylor Swift
“The University of Texas at Austin is giving students a chance to study Taylor Swift lyrics alongside works by such literary icons as Shakespeare, John Keats and yes, Robert Frost.

The school is offering an undergraduate course – “The Taylor Swift Songbook” – this fall as part of its liberal arts honors program. It comes on the heels of a Swift-themed class at New York University last spring that ended with the singer as the commencement speaker.“

Fox News - November 29, 2023 -
Taylor Swift course at Harvard will use music to explore race, class and 'White Americanness'
“Students will learn ‘how to think about White texts, Southern texts, transatlantic texts and queer subtexts'”

Yahoo! News - December 1, 2023 -
In her college-era: Taylor Swift course being offered at Northeastern University
”According to Northeastern Global News, the new intersession class called “Speak Now: Gender & Storytelling in Taylor Swift’s Eras,” will explore “how women’s literary and cultural influences on genre and narrative have shaped the artistry of Taylor Swift’s ten eras,” according to the course description.”

 

Piedmont Community College, University of South Dakota School of Law, Rice University and others in this sister-board thread.

UVA Darden published an MBA case study about pricing her masters.

 

Tay-Tay has a Masters?

 

She's a distance learner like us!

Taylor Swift receives her high school diploma (Chron.com, July 27, 2008)

 

Thank you.

 

She doesn't have a Master's. She does own her masters, and they are reportedly worth in the hundreds of millions.

 

I wonder how one can value pop music masters. I'm certainly not suggesting that she isn't very wealthy indeed but if she died tomorrow and someone asked me to evaluate her estate for tax purposes I don't know how I'd do it beyond hiring "experts".

 

Master ownership gives the owner royalty rights. Examine the past / present income stream and project accordingly. Get a musically-hip bean-counter to do it. A specialist.

 

...hence, a case study from UVA Darden.

Conceptually, I bet ownership rights to a Master are worth the expected discounted cash flow from royalties. In practice, it probably gets very technical and complicated. One thing for sure: the value is substantial. When Scooter Brown bought Big Machine Records for $200M, approximately 80% of its assets were the masters of Taylor's first 6 albums. I pity the poor saps who bought these rights from him, now that Taylor's almost done re-recording the albums.

 

Heck! All you have to do is predict the future, right? Should be a slam-dunk, then. ... Shouldn't it?

 

Maybe...you're making a bunch of assumptions though. That the music will remain as popular in future as it is now even without Tay-Tay playing it in concert for instance. Popular music sometimes comes and goes. I don't know. I think it's probably a matter of doing the best you can.

 

That's exactly what a stock price is: market's best guess of the discounted cash flow.

 

I know that. I've learned a bit about NPV, discounted cash flows etc. Back when I was a young whippersnapper of 53 or so, I got an A in investment math in college. Like I said, it's predicting the future. Sarcasm about that being so easy. It's easy to guess. Hard to guess right. Almost impossible to do so on a frequent basis. But then there's George Soros. We are not all George.

 

When she was 8, and her friends wanted to become ballerinas and astronauts, Taylor wanted to become a stockbroker like her dad.

 

How sad for us if she had...

 

That...depends...

 

As her fan base ages, those songs could become elevator instrumental music, or jingles for commercials, or covered as a Country song, or in a throwback movie about one’s youth during the year the song was released and used in the movie soundtrack? Either way someone will be paid. She owns the rights. She’ll get paid.

 

No, I'm not making assumptions. That's not what I do. Those who specialize in this have methods. They've examined those patterns in other songs - Today's data analysis techniques will give them at least a workable idea of how the song will hold up, its chance of a resurgence and the areas in which there won't likely be so much of a return. The values of ancillary uses, such as jingles , covers and movies that @MaceWindu referred, to can all be figured in. By experts, not by me. To poach (and misquote) a Jerry Lee Lewis title, "Whole Lotta Study Goin' On," - historical data. And maybe some "least squares," I wouldn't doubt. Mostly much more complex math than those, though.

"It's an art - it's a science - and big, big money." What a combo! Fascinating! Beats hell out of doing rocket trajectories all day!