{"id":864297,"date":"2026-09-29T04:02:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-29T04:02:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/864297\/"},"modified":"2026-09-29T04:02:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-29T04:02:09","slug":"todd-rundgren-says-taylor-swift-ruined-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/864297\/","title":{"rendered":"Todd Rundgren Says Taylor Swift ‘Ruined Music’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tTodd Rundgren<\/a>, the singer-songwriter and producer behind hits like \u201cHello It\u2019s Me\u201d and \u201cI Saw the Light,\u201d recently slammed Taylor Swift<\/a>, calling the pop star \u201cthe apotheosis of mediocrity\u201d and claiming that she \u201cruined music.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cTo me, Taylor Swift is the apotheosis of mediocrity,\u201d Rundgren said in an interview with Vulture<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s the era of the female artists.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tRundgren got on the topic of Swift when asked who his target would be if he were to produce an album to make fun of an artist today. (He produced \u201cBat Out of Hell\u201d by Meat Loaf in 1977 and famously said he didn\u2019t care if it succeeded or not because he wanted to make fun of Bruce Springsteen.) \u201cTaylor Swift, of course,\u201d he responded. \u201cThere\u2019s an argument to be made that she ruined music. It\u2019s an understandable phenomenon.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHe continued to explain that the biggest artists in the world are now female \u201cbecause of video games.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cBack in the \u201990s, boys stopped spending money on music and started spending it on video games, and that left the music market with, \u2018Well, where do we go here?\u2019 And they said, \u2018Well, there\u2019s all these young girls and they\u2019ve got their allowances, too,\u201d he said. \u201cWhy don\u2019t we start making music for young girls instead of Pearl Jam or something like that?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tRundgren\u2019s comments come on the heels of Swift\u2019s most recent musical release, \u201cThe Life of a Showgirl: The Encore.\u201d She broke two Spotify records<\/a> thanks to the deluxe version of her 2025 album: the new release \u201cPatient Zero\u201d broke the record for the most-streamed song by a female artist in a day so far this year, while Swift had the most streams out of any female artist in a day in 2026. <\/p>\n

\n\tAt the 2026 MTV VMAs, Swift was honored with the inaugural Artist-Director Award.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Todd Rundgren, the singer-songwriter and producer behind hits like \u201cHello It\u2019s Me\u201d and \u201cI Saw the Light,\u201d recently…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":864298,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[88,216,4915,122693],"class_list":["post-864297","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-taylor-swift","tag-todd-rundgren"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/864297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=864297"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/864297\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/864298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=864297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=864297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=864297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}