• stoly@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    I don’t know anything about her. Was she born wealthy? That could explain a lot of the success.

    • baseless_discourse@mander.xyz
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      11 months ago

      According to wikipedia:

      Taylor Alison Swift was born on December 13, 1989,[1] in West Reading, Pennsylvania.[2] She is named after singer-songwriter James Taylor.[3] Her father, Scott Kingsley Swift, is a former stockbroker for Merrill Lynch[4] and her mother, Andrea Gardner Swift (née Finlay), is a former homemaker who previously worked as a mutual fund marketing executive.[5] Taylor has a younger brother, actor Austin Swift.[6]

      Not an emerald mine, but at least upper middle class.

        • baseless_discourse@mander.xyz
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          11 months ago

          Hum, that is not what wikipedia says:

          Carl Moyes was a truck driver hauling produce for C.R. England in the 1940s out of northern Utah.[4] In the late 1950s Betty and Carl Moyes started a small trucking company in Plain City, Utah, B & C Truck Leasing. After their son, Jerry, graduated from Weber State University in 1966, they moved the small company to Phoenix, Arizona. Carl and his two sons, Ronald and Jerry (vice-president), formed the company Common Market in Arizona, that would become Swift.

          Also

          The name Swift Transportation was purchased from a descendant of the Swift Meat Packing family, when the Moyes family bought the trucking assets of Swift & Company. The three Moyes family members and a fourth partner, Randy Knight, grew the business to $25 million in annual revenues by 1984. Jerry Moyes became president, chairman, and CEO that same year, and when Carl died in 1985, Jerry bought out the other two partners, his brother Ronald and Randy Knight. Ronald would continue to hold shares in Swift while Randy would become a co-founder of Knight Transportation.[6]

          https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_Transportation

          • RGB3x3@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            Yep, you’re right. I was lied to by a friend.

            I think I need to stop trusting them with factual tidbits.

    • PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      She was. She basically bought her way into the music industry. In her early years, a lot of her hype was manufactured and astroturfed. Notably she did write her early songs herself, (the vast majority of pop songs are ghostwritten,) but didn’t have enough appeal to actually break into the industry. So her rich parents basically bought her a record label contract.

      She has managed to turn the original millions into over a billion. So that is absolutely notable. But she wasn’t born poor, and it’s not a rags-to-riches story. Even without music, she never would’ve had to worry about rent or groceries.

    • callouscomic@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      Looks as if she grew up in a comfortably upper class family. Maybe not mega rich, but they had money, a giant house, and land, and seem to have been able to use money to get her seen in the right places.

      Regardless, she clearly has talent far beyond simply coming from an affluent childhood.

      • Guntrigger@feddit.ch
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        11 months ago

        We have different definitions of mega rich. Stockbroker money, giant house and land… what other boxes need to be ticked?

        • Guntrigger@feddit.ch
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          11 months ago

          Because it’s quite ignorant. In no world is an upper class daughter of a stockbroker not filthy rich.

          Sure she has some songwriting talent, but would she be as big as she is without that generational wealth backing her from birth?

          • jj4211@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            would she be as big as she is without that generational wealth backing her from birth?

            Maybe? Dolly Parton had relatively humble beginnings. My wife’s school had a random band that made a decent splash in the industry with radio play time and record sales. Not Parton or Swift level, but still; they seemed decent enough but didn’t see anything to know why a label went for them over a bunch of other similarly decent acts.

            Celebrity can be weird sometimes. Sometimes you see someone pour all sorts of resources in trying to be ‘popular’ and fail, and sometimes you see someone come randomly out of nowhere.

    • doggle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      11 months ago

      Well to do with parents who were shockingly willing to bend over backwards to give her a chance at success. She’s still remarkably wealthy given where she started but it’s no rags to riches story.