If you’re a human being with eyes and ears, it’s been hard to survive the last few years untouched by Taylor Swift’s cultural fervor, which in turn has made it hard to avoid a opinion her.
Your NFL gamesyour Thanksgiving tables and your Instagram feeds have turned Swift from a pop superstar into a regular part of your everyday life — so, like most other parts of your everyday life, you’ve developed feelings.
This turns out to be the most impressive thing about Taylor Swift — not your opinion, but the fact that you have one. It reflects Swift’s greatest success as an artist: her ability to make a fortune out of her fame and vice versa.
The first part of that equation – fame – has been the responsibility in the world of golf for the past decade. As the pro game has evolved from a part-time sprint to a 50-week-a-year marathon, the result has been nothing short of Swiftmania. Instead of obsessing over golf, many fans have fallen into a state of ambivalence — fed up with the length of the season, the lack of anticipation or cohesion between events and the 11.5-month delay without a break. The players have felt it too; when LIV entered the sport in the early 2020s, its defectors championed schedule freedom as one of the deciding factors in taking the plunge (though tens of millions in signing bonuses certainly didn’t hurt).
At the time of golf’s expanding schedule, the prevailing theory was that adding events was a necessary component of golf’s desire for ever-growing wealth. (If players wanted to make more money, the theory went, they needed to get more hours of television coverage on the networks.) In some ways, that theory proved true — the improved schedule helped the PGA Tour land a historic set of 10-year rights deals in 2019, and LIV expanded its schedule to boost revenue as its losses approached $5 billion.
But adding volume without worrying about quality was always a flawed strategy. Think about what it might look like if the business in question was your local restaurant. Your restaurant’s ability to make money is limited by the number of tables in the dining room, but its business is much more directly affected by the quality of the food. Your local restaurant could make more money by building an additional dining room, but if that came at the expense of food quality (or even ENDURANCE), the momentary increase in revenue would not be worth the long-term decline in reputation. Your restaurant’s most loyal customers (the die-hards) may stick around and learn the dishes that still work, but its exposure to the wider community will stagnate and business will begin to shrink.
This kind of trend is new PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp is hired to give back. Rolapp, a veteran NFL executive, has stepped into the top job at professional golf’s biggest tournament promising “significant change” in the business. He is careful to mention ABSENCE AND simplicity as two of the main focuses of his administration – reducing the size and menu of the PGA Tour restaurant in search of a better overall meal.
“I think the focus is going to be creating events that really matter,” Rolapp said. “The competition should be easy to follow. The regular season and postseason should be connected in a way that builds to the tournament championship in a way that all sports fans can understand.”
Of course, the same argument works in reverse: Adding quality without worrying about volume is also a bad idea. If your local restaurant was the best restaurant in town but could only seat 10 people a night, you might achieve great fame but never amass a great fortune. What good would it be to run the best restaurant in town if you couldn’t afford to pay your rent?
Which brings us back to Swift, the pop star with the best of both worlds: fame AND wealth, quality AND the volume. Two weeks ago, Swift’s newest album, The Life of a Showgirlbroke another set of music industry records including biggest sales week from any album ever. Later, Swift followed that act by announcing her latest creative endeavor: A Disney+ miniseries that follows her as she creates another one multi-billion dollar entity, he said Age tournament. These newly sprouted money trees were just part of a wider list of new Taylor Swift offerings surrounding the album’s release, such as a limited-release cinema during the album’s opening weekend, a limited-edition Summertime Pink Spritz Shimmer vinyl or New heights The podcast look that set the whole album machine in motion.
You didn’t have to look long at Swift these past few weeks to see a unifying theory emerge: Swift has a core product (her music), an events business (her world tour(s), a video business (her TV and film offerings), and a hard products business (vinyls, merch, and other goodies.) In each of these tentacles, Swift has created her entry points for any kind of consumer: see it in Sunday Night Football), her core audience (her regular listeners and concert-goers) and her die-hard audience (her superfans). In each of these tentacles and for each group of fans, Swift has an innate sense of how to deliver the goods, from catchy Billboard #1 hits to metaphors hidden within a deep well of “secret tracks.”
At the intersection of the worlds of quality and volume, Swift has found … both. She has built the world’s largest music restaurant and supplied it with a massive marketing budget, an endless stream of regulars, and a special off-menu menu for die-hards. Everywhere you look, Swift is selling a product that reinforces her fame AND increases her wealth.
The result? Swift is a billionaire, claiming a net worth of $1.6 billion in 2025. according to Forbesand an undisputed vice over the title of the most famous person in the world.
Swift’s lesson for the golf pro is simple: The choice between quality and volume is not binary. You can have both, but you can’t have them easily. The balance between these two traits exists on a razor’s edge – and requires an incredibly deft hand.
After all, without Swift’s obsession with the infinitesimal details of songwriting and composition, she could never have authored a steady stream of No. 1 hits. 1. And without the status of hit no. 1, she could never dream of world fame. Without worldwide fame, Swift would never have achieved the cultural phenomenon that she did Age tournament. And without Age tour — and the massive, slickly operated business that supports it — Swift could never dream of billionaire status or a regular place at your Thanksgiving table.
It is in these small details that fortunes are made and lost, and in these small details that the golf professional faces a massive opportunity. The sport doesn’t already lack abundant volume and quality – now it needs to bring those things together to become a business far greater than the sum of its parts.
Ultimately, the goal is to get the world to listen to you, but first you have to listen really close to the world around you.
It’s golf time to listen and the ride begins on the 1st tee.
;)
