Taylor Swift is a global phenomenon being both discussed from a music, pop-cultural and economic perspective. A core reason for Taylor Swift’s success is her talent to have created a close group of followers called “Swifties”. Until now, empirical insights on this group of people are scarce. Therefore, we studied with the present work what makes people being interested in Taylor Swift. For this we set up an online platform where N = 485 people participated. By contrasting people being interested in Taylor Swift - but not identifying as Swiftie - vs. being interested in her and identifying as Swiftie, we observe that for both groups of people the main interest to follow Taylor is her music (item level analysis). Factorial analysis of our scale assessing motives of being interested in Taylor revealed three factors called Music/Escapism (1), Taylor being a Role Model (2) and Taylor being an Icon (3).
Montag et al. (Mon,) studied this question.