PREreview del Why are people interested in Taylor Swift?

This study assessed the reasons behind fans’ interest in Taylor Swift.

The method they used was to give an online questionnaire to a large group of people which asked about how interested they were in Taylor Swift, when they first started listening to her (if applicable), whether they considered themselves a swiftie, which factors contributed the most to their interest in Taylor Swift (if applicable), and also asked many questions about the participants’ personality, their attachment to social media, and the last question aimed to measure their satisfaction in life.

The results showed the main factors on why people are interested in Taylor Swift: Music/Escapism, Role Model and Icon, females were significantly more interested in Taylor Swift than males, and swifties generally had stronger motivations for taking interest in her than non swifties except for having a friend that is interested, and the year of becoming aware of Taylor was also related to being interested in her.

This study advances the field by further proving the mere-exposure effect and also giving us insight on what makes celebrities, especially famous singers, interesting to those who take interest in them.

Issues 

• Data was mostly collected from European countries, the majority of them being from Germany. This is an issue as Taylor Swift is an international celebrity, and if the majority of people they assess are from one country, it would be harder to pinpoint the exact reasons for her popularity as the results could be affected by cultural influences.

• Part of the results they emphasised was that they observed significantly more female participants reporting to be interested in Taylor Swift (243 females vs 27 males). The number of female participants that took part in the study after data cleaning was 406 and the number of male participants was 79. I do not think that it is a fair comparison when the gender ratio is blown out of proportion from the start, however I do recognise this could just be a misinterpretation on my part.

• Despite having many questions later on in the survey about personality, social media attachment, and satisfaction which could have given profound insight, there seems to be no reference to it in the results and discussion section.

• Participants might give biased responses due to it being a questionnaire, but this is minor as it is very difficult to assess people’s beliefs and personality any other way, let alone ethically on a large scale.

• The word “interest” is quite vague in my opinion, a minor issue.

Competing interests

The author declares that they have no competing interests.

Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

The author declares that they did not use generative AI to come up with new ideas for their review.