As December begins and I start to accept my fate that I won’t be attending the Taylor Swift concert in Vancouver this weekend, I’ve resigned myself to the inevitable: watching the concerts on a grainy TikTok livestream. But as I sit here planning my weekend and finding the best streamers, I wonder — this can’t actually be legal, can it?
On the surface, it’s clearly not. When fans livestream the concert, they’re broadcasting copyrighted material without permission.1 People are doing more than recording the concert for their own memories to look back on later; they are broadcasting the concert to thousands of people and oftentimes making money off the streams. It gets even trickier when you consider that Taylor recorded some of her concerts on the tour to create a film, and sold the streaming rights for the film to Disney.2 Fans live-streaming her concerts may be seen as competing with this official, licensed content—and Disney isn’t usually one to let things slide.
However, Taylor and her team don’t seem to be shutting it down. While on stage at one of her concerts in LA, when talking about how great an experience the tour has been for her because of the crowds she’d been playing for, she also acknowledged the livestream watchers, stating, “it’s also really sweet that some people watch the shows online.”3 Additionally, in preparation for Taylor’s six shows in Toronto, Rogers invested $8 million into its 5G network at Rogers Centre to deliver three times more network capacity throughout the stadium4—a move that can be seen as encouraging live-streaming. As someone who watched a stream from that show, the quality was better and clearer, and there were noticeably a lot more of them.
Taylor seems to have let this slide, either as free promo for the concert or as genuine appreciation for fans who couldn’t snag a ticket. While this phenomenon of live-streaming may be unique to the massive scope and success of the Eras Tour, it raises an important question: what happens if it carries over (in such a volume) to concerts of smaller artists? For up-and-coming performers, every ticket sale counts, and watching a free livestream instead of attending in person could have a much greater financial impact. So, what do you think—should artists embrace the free publicity, or is this a slippery slope for intellectual property rights, especially for those who don’t have the luxury of Taylor’s level of success?
P.S. If anyone has an extra ticket, please let me know :p
- https://toronto.citynews.ca/2024/11/23/swifties-live-streaming-eras-tour-concerts-say-theyre-part-of-a-community/ ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- https://www.reddit.com/r/TaylorSwift/comments/15k1ebk/taylor_talking_about_fans_who_follow_the_tour/ ↩︎
- https://globalnews.ca/news/10886670/taylor-swift-eras-tour-videos/ ↩︎
Thumbnail Photo Credit: Kevin Mazur / Getty for TAS (https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2023/03/taylor-swift-eras-tour-review/673438/)
Copyright & Social Media
Communications Law