Well if you want to be really cynical you could say “when one gets successful enough,” and that makes sense to me - at T Swift or Ed Sheeran’s level of success, the global music tours make their workday a matter of planning things out and negotiating - and they’re so successful that they have a bunch of people to do it for them already!! So it is at that point, where your workday goes from actually writing songs to just reusing what you’ve written.
Sensibly though, you could say they are both. People can be 2 things at once. One of the most famous “architects” in the world is Bjarke Ingels but he actually just owns the company; his training is in illustration rather than architectural design. He is a creative, and it informs his practice and what he actually approves, but a large part of being recognised as an architect is actually from doing the non-architect part of it.
The reason Mardukas specifically says Taylor Swift is more capitalist than musician though is something very precise to Taylor swift: her career was launched by her dad, a big finance guy, who pushed her work onto all his clients when she was just a kid. Taylor went from being marketed as a country musician to being a pop musician. He explicitly didn’t want her to have to work very hard in life and felt confident he could engineer a following for her. She must be richer than him now, so it worked better than expected.
If you earn your musician wings from having them bought for you, you have not ascended the bardic steps to stardom, but floated up in a hot air balloon instead.
When does one stop being an artist and turn into a capitalist
Well if you want to be really cynical you could say “when one gets successful enough,” and that makes sense to me - at T Swift or Ed Sheeran’s level of success, the global music tours make their workday a matter of planning things out and negotiating - and they’re so successful that they have a bunch of people to do it for them already!! So it is at that point, where your workday goes from actually writing songs to just reusing what you’ve written.
Sensibly though, you could say they are both. People can be 2 things at once. One of the most famous “architects” in the world is Bjarke Ingels but he actually just owns the company; his training is in illustration rather than architectural design. He is a creative, and it informs his practice and what he actually approves, but a large part of being recognised as an architect is actually from doing the non-architect part of it.
The reason Mardukas specifically says Taylor Swift is more capitalist than musician though is something very precise to Taylor swift: her career was launched by her dad, a big finance guy, who pushed her work onto all his clients when she was just a kid. Taylor went from being marketed as a country musician to being a pop musician. He explicitly didn’t want her to have to work very hard in life and felt confident he could engineer a following for her. She must be richer than him now, so it worked better than expected.
If you earn your musician wings from having them bought for you, you have not ascended the bardic steps to stardom, but floated up in a hot air balloon instead.