Not a week has gone by since the start of 2024 without the immense community of Taylor Swift fans taking action to defend their star, by brilliantly subverting the codes of certain platforms.
Overnight, hundreds of millions of videos on TikTok were left without any sound. All music by Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, Ariana Grande, but also Drake and the Beatles disappeared. What do they have in common? They signed under the Universal label, which removed its music from the Chinese platform after failing to reach a financial agreement on January 31.
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According to Universal, the remuneration of singers offered by Tiktok would be miserable. On the TikTok side, Universal is accused of greed… In summary, we are talking about a story of big money here.
And as usual in these matters, the most interesting thing is to be found on the side of the users. In this case, from the strength of Taylor Swift fans. What happens when your favorite artist's songs disappear? You sing them yourself, of course! Hundreds, thousands of Internet users began to reproduce the singer's performances, so that others could reuse this music legally. Be careful, watch your ears.
You may have recognized Exile by Taylor Swift. But it will not have escaped your notice that the first version was not as melodious as the original. But other covers are quite successful, using a maximum of vocoder to fool the TikTok algorithm.
There, we almost recognizes the original !
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Taylor Swift fans are everywhere, all the time
Here we again have a good example of how users manage to circumvent the limits of platforms to invent new uses. Moreover, this musical censorship allows ifine to generate new original content and put a piece back into the machine.
But there is still a particularity among Taylor Swift fans, who have an unparalleled mobilizing force online. Just last week, they reacted massively after the singer saw her image diverted into deepfakes pornographic. Filthy montages that use his face to create X-rated content. To arms, “swifties”! Fans launched a massive counterattack by publishing a large number of real videos of the singer's performances to drown out these montages.
We tend to say that the web of social networks is dying out: Taylor Swift and her fans prove us wrong, visibly every week.
