Did Taylor Swift Turn Down the Super Bowl Halftime Show?
Well, it’s official: Bad Bunny will headline the Super Bowl LX halftime show. Not Taylor Swift.
Bad Bunny is certainly no one’s second choice or backup, but it did look for a while like the NFL and Apple Music/Roc Nation, the companies that produce the event, were going after Swift, which begs the question: was that just a rumor, wishful thinking, or did talks fall apart? From what we’ve heard, a little of all of it. Here’s what we knowâŠ
The alleged âconditionâ the NFL wouldn’t meetThe halftime show is famously an unpaid gig, which isn’t to say the NFL doesn’t pay for it. The league covers all the expenses of the show (travel, stage set-up, dancer fees, etc.), it just doesn’t pay the actual performer. That said, they always book people who are already really rich, and their albums always get a boost from the gig, so money isn’t an issue, and it doesn’t seem to have been for Swift. No, the issue was allegedlyâŠrights.
Taylor Swift performing at The Eras Tour in LondonKate Green/Getty Images
As any Swiftie knows, owning her work is huge for Taylor, who recently bought back the master recordings of her first six albums after a long and arduous process. According to Complex, Swift wanted to retain ownership of her performance and the NFL âflatly refused,â and that’s where talks broke down.
To be honest, we don’t know what that means in practical terms. The right to record it herself for a re-broadcast at a later date? Get the audio for a live album? But Taylor definitely knows what it means, she basically has a PhD in artist rights at this point.
(There are also multiple outlets reporting that she wanted to be paid or get âa deal that reflected her worthâ but all of this language can be traced back to anonymous quotes from a small-time British gossip columnist’s Substack with fewer than a thousand subscribers. Why a music industry insider would talk to this guy over another outlet is pretty mystifying. The rights thing is the only credible explanation we can find in the press.)
Other possible concernsKnowing what we know about Swift’s life, here are some other things that could have made a possible Super Bowl performance in February complicated:
