Are You Ready for It? Re-Evaluating Taylor Swift.

Many fans before the show included explanations that they preferred the "old Taylor" or "McGraw Taylor" (i.e. country music Taylor) but enjoyed the concert, nevertheless. And while Swift's oeuvre itself may not stand the test of time in quite the same way, a recent survey by the guitar maker Fender revealed that over half of new guitar sales are now made to women, a phenomenon which they dubbed "The Taylor Swift factor", meaning that her influence may have an even more lasting effect on how popular music sounds, going forward (Wang [31]; O'Connor [18]). We hope that this special issue will contribute to the process of reconsidering and repositioning not only Swift, but also other women artists and their fans, as young scholars who grew up listening to Taylor Swift find themselves called to the study of serious (i.e. Taylor Swift) music. As guitar sales have surged in the wake of Swift's success, as discussed above, Volpe investigates the experience of the individual fan performance of covers of Swift's songs as a radical way of knowing. [Extracted from the article]