Top artists now operate as franchises rather than standalone album creators.

Evidence

Yet, despite her cultural and commercial dominance, Swift declined to take the Neptunes’ path of experimentation. She saw herself as a business. “Commerce used to be a dirty word,” said music lawyer Cliff Fluet. “Now it’s like, ‘I’m an industry, a conglomerate. I’m Taylor Swift Inc.’ ” This made it difficult to judge her output as music. Critics, notably The New Yorker’s Sinéad O’Sullivan, noted flaws in her eleventh studio album, The Tortured Poets Department: “the interminable length, the repetitive synth overlays…the uninspired lyrics.” But this was beside the point. “She is not creating standalone albums,” O’Sullivan wrote, “but, rather, a musical franchise.” The album’s performance surely satisfied her corporate-level KPIs: The Tortured Poets Department broke records with 314.5 million streams on its first day of release. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 634

Categorization

• DEFINE: O’Sullivan’s ‘musical franchise’ concept is a concrete instance of the omnivore monoculture — albums flattened into brand extensions.
• XREF: Connects to the ‘death of the sellout’ motif — when dominance is total, the sellout gesture dies.