Taylor Swift: Understanding Miss Americana star’s fanbase in Southeast Asia

The music industry can be a bankable business, but less have cultivated a career combo as lucrative and influential as one Taylor Alison Swift.

Currently on her sixth concert tour, the biggest and most expansive to date — she’s hitting five continents, with 146 dates confirmed — the multi-hyphenated American singer-songwriter is expected to rake in a record-breaking $1 billion and more in ticket sales, thanks to her Eras Tour. It is reportedly projected to generate $2.2 billion, which would make it the highest-grossing tour for any artist ever.

Touted as taking fans on a journey through Swift’s musical career, beginning from her self-titled 2006 debut album, the tour kicked off in March of this year and is set to run until November 2024.

This time around, Swift’s tour includes Singapore, the only Southeast Asian stop for the duration. She is also performing in Japan and Australia, but nowhere else in the Southeast Asian region, known to boast some of her most massive fan base.

“She’s got such a massive following and they’re so totally in love with her that there’s nothing really like it,” says Sean Matjeraie, content director and station head for Fly FM, an English-language radio station in Malaysia, adding, “Even if you compare it to BTS or Blackpink, her fans are so, so protective of her. [They are] into her music, into her lifestyle, into her. I would almost say it’s [like a mass] media cult.”

According to Matjeraie, Swift is not only one of the most popular artists to play on radio, but also says “there is almost certainty for us that people will like her songs.”

“Once new songs of hers come out, we’re gonna play it. We don’t even need for people to be asking for these songs, we know they want to hear it.”

In recent years, it seems like her pop darling persona has only risen to even more dizzying heights. The ingredients to her success? Swift's stellar ability to create deep-rooted bonds with her fans, who affectionately call themselves Swifties, as well as tell compelling stories, and consistently move the needle on her musical prowess.

Based on data from Spotify, Swift is the second most-streamed artist of 2022 globally, and the top artist of several countries including Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore.

Jakarta and Quezon City in the Philippines also make up two of the top five monthly listeners from global cities, with the former at the top spot, leading with 2,850,770 listeners. Swift clocks in a total of 100,931,446 monthly listeners on the streaming platform.

While Swifties in the region may not necessarily see themselves in the electric blue-eyed, blonde, and modelesque image of Swift, it is her soul-baring songwriting that holds up a mirror for people to reflect.

“Her music relates very deeply to all the individuals out there because they feel almost alone in this feeling, whereas her music makes you, as a person who feels alone, feel like you have something to come together with. I believe that’s how she relates to the average Malaysian or the average Southeast Asian,” he explains.

Matjeraie adds: “The [reason] why she can capture new, younger audiences nowadays, I believe is because of that, because they can now envelop this whole relationship with her, even though they don’t know her, because they’re so used to developing these relationships anyway … [by] spending so much time online, having access to social media and news so quickly.”

Each of Swift’s albums feature a distinctive aesthetic and style, a way to not only experiment sonically, but also lyrically articulate universal themes in a compelling manner. Her Reputation Era saw an edgier version of the Look What You Made Me Do singer, while Lover gave plush colours and dreamy vibes.

In fact, many of Swift’s fans would tell you her brilliance lies in the relatability of her songs and albums.

24-year-old Chelsea Leong from Ipoh, a town about two hours away from Malaysia’s capital Kuala Lumpur, says Swift’s second album Fearless, as well as Speak Now, which was released in 2010 particularly struck a chord. “I could very much relate because I’d find myself screaming my lungs out to the songs in those albums as if I meant everything I’m singing to my crush.”

It’s sort of like writing down secrets of infatuation and crushes, anxiety and insecurities, pep talks and note-to-selfs in your journal or diary — but when the pen is in Swift’s hand, the words are more refined, it’s meaning amplified, and voice broadcasted for all ears to hear, and more importantly, hearts to feel. It helps that they’re catchy too.

Even when it seemed like the whole world had bad blood with the singer, during the infamous feud with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian about lyrics to one of West’s rap songs, Swifties like 29-year-old Verca Putri had her back.

Hailing from Jakarta, but living in Thailand for the past five years, she says: “I’m a hardcore fan, and I still love her music. She went on hiatus for a while after the feud, [but] her song released in 2017, Look What You Made Me Do, is still one of my top three favourites.”

Meanwhile, speaking about the Taylor Swift fandom in Malaysia, 28-year-old Imelda Priveta says, “Everyone is very supportive of each other. Like they have your back.

“Not to mention, Taylor herself is always advocating about being kind to others and yourself, as well as encouraging people to allow themselves to experience emotions that come with every part of life.”

Swifties in the Philippines ran a hashtag campaign — #WeWantErasTourPhilippines — prior to the tour announcement, hoping that Swift would make a stop in the country for her world tour. A popular Taylor Swift impersonator, Taylor Sheesh, also gave a now internet-viral lip-sync performance to a packed mall in Quezon City, with the same hopes of Swift performing in the Philippines.

Getting your hands on Taylor Swift tickets is not an easy feat. For one, the sheer amount of people trying to buy tickets often causes ticketing websites to crash.

When tour dates were unveiled, reports of Singaporeans lining up outside local post offices for tickets surfaced. A tuition centre even promised students who top its economics test tickets to Swift’s Eras Tour, amongst countless other reports.

Timothy Tuan, 25, from Kuala Lumpur, describes Swift’s music as “timeless,” saying that “her recent rerelease of her old works, made me realise how timeless her songs — old and new — really are.”

Tuan was among one of the lucky Swifties to secure tickets to the show in Singapore by strategizing with fellow fans. After waiting for three hours in the online queue, he was about to lose hope as his computer screen showed there were close to 100,000 people in line.

“We were all in the queue. One friend got in first, but his payment could not go through. and then he got kicked out because it reached the time limit. My other friend’s queue number was at 30k+ but she got in, quickly chose the seats, checked out, and called each one of us to break the news.”