Write a bad review of Taylor Swift and get death threats: Inside the fan backlash facing critics in the digital age

When pop superstar Taylor Swift releases a new album, the Swifties are usually on standby to shield her and defend her from criticism - by all means necessary. Earlier this month, she released her 12th studio album to mixed reviews. Swift's album rollouts have brought about threats of doxxing, harassment, and cyberbullying directed at her critics, many of them being music journalists whose job is to review an album. 

This time, while there haven’t yet been widespread reports of Swiftie ire (perhaps because they also didn’t like the album), journalists who didn’t give her a positive review have not been exempt from online harassment. Here are a couple of examples. 

• “You ain’t gonna be this brave when we drop your address”
• “[The Guardian’s music journalist] Alexis Petridis f-you”
• “I hope you get fired for your CLEARLY biased review. You are the bane of journalism and deserve nothing short of a painful long life in some gulag in Siberia to realise how awful of a human being you are”

This is not a new phenomenon. Over the past few years, artists and their fans have become emboldened to attack music journalists over a bad (or even a mildly positive) review. 

Many music journalists have documented the harassment, doxxing, and death threats they have received from fans of artists like Taylor Swift, Nicki Minaj, Drake, and BTS. 

Sometimes, artists themselves, like singers Lana Del Rey and Lizzo, have taken to social media to name and shame journalists for bad reviews. 

The potential for brutal harassment has not gone unnoticed. Last year, US music magazine Paste decided not to name the critic who reviewed the Taylor Swift album that came out that year, out of fear for their safety. 

Canadian music magazine Exclaim! also chose to keep the identity of the writer who covered the quarrel between Nicki Minaj and Megan Thee Stallion anonymous “to protect them from the Barbz [Nicki Minaj fans].”

I spoke with five music journalists from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and South Korea about the state of music journalism today and about pursuing music criticism in an age when a bad review can cause a swarm of online abuse to come your way.

The fans vs the critics 

“I have luckily never reviewed an album where I was genuinely afraid of the response to my piece, but if my editor was like, ‘Hey, we want you to review the new Taylor Swift album,’ I would probably be like, ‘Okay, let me put all my social media accounts on private and I’ll maybe not post pictures of myself for the time being,” said Grace Robins-Somerville, a freelance music journalist based in the US.

While Robins-Somerville mostly covers more alternative artists, she has seen the vitriol many fans have against music journalists and critics online where “anything less than a perfect score is seen as negative.”

The journalists I spoke to describe a range of online harassment that has come their way after a negative review, from cyberbullying to doxxing to threatening physical harm to themselves and their families. 

El Hunt is a freelance music and culture journalist based in the UK. She told me that fans have called her homophobic slurs, insulted her appearance, and pulled up personal photos from her family. To combat it, she has implemented more robust privacy settings on her social media accounts and has simply stopped posting.

“Now when it happens I just ignore it,” she said. “I’ve tried to respond to it before and it just hasn’t really worked or it has attracted more attention with comments getting increasingly more over the line, so now I honestly just ignore it.”

Minjae Jung, a pop music critic and music journalist in South Korea, said that the worst abuse he endured was when he reported on a K-pop idol’s legal troubles. Fans attempted to hack his social media accounts and he also received multiple death threats, spam emails, and even phone calls from fans. 

“I received tons of emails and DMs and even phone calls from people around the world. I took calls from Iraq and parts of Africa,” he explained. “How do they know my phone number? I don’t know. Even my wife received messages from those fans, so it was all really shocking.”

Despite the swarm of online harassment that Jung has encountered, he said that he simply sees it as part of his job. To him, this backlash is confirmation that the voice of the music journalist still matters today and that music journalism does carry influence in the industry. 

“I always tell younger writers in Korea not to be afraid of those attacks,” he said. “If you are confident in your writing and you believe what you wrote, then attacks by angry fans won’t really damage you.”

Raphael Rashid, another journalist in South Korea, has also experienced the wrath of K-pop fans. When he wrote an article about his experience attending a concert, he said he was inundated with negative messages from fans who saw him portray the band in a “negative way”. His experience covering K-pop has made Rashid shy away from covering the industry altogether. 

“[The fans] will find a reason to cancel you; they will hound you; they will email you; they will email your employer to fire you; and then you’ll get death threats,” he said. “It’s relentless, but I feel like I’ve learned to become stronger in the process of being cyberbullied so much by these people. I’ve now realised these are just pixels on a screen.” 

Megan LaPierre, an associate online editor at the Canadian music magazine Exclaim!, said that while she has personally not received any death threats (some of her colleagues have), she is concerned that artists and fans being more emboldened to attack critics can lead to self-censorship. 

“It has created a sort of culture of fear within music journalists where they are not fully expressing themselves out of fear of being targeted and even sometimes spoken back to directly by the artist,” she said. 

Low pay and low reward

The low pay makes the intense harassment critics receive even harder to justify, leading to avoidance and self-censorship. Hunt, who has been working as a freelance music journalist for over ten years, pointed out that she hasn’t seen freelance rates change since 2011. She believes that the trade-off between the low pay and the heat brought by fan backlash is a significant factor in why some critics are publishing fewer reviews. 

“A lot of critics are getting paid minimum wage,” said Hunt. “So I don’t blame people if they would rather just have an easy life and not deal with Taylor Swift’s fan base or whoever it may be blowing up in your phone for days afterwards.”

Robins-Somerville has seen music journalism become less viable for freelancers like herself as a full-time job due to rates remaining low. 

“The vast majority of music journalists I know do this on top of whatever their jobs are,” she said. “No one's in it for the money. Everyone's just kind of in it for the love of the game.”

In addition to freelance rates not changing significantly over the past decades, many big publishers have turned their backs on culture criticism altogether. Earlier this year, for example, The New York Times reassigned two of its long-time music critics into unspecified new roles. Vanity Fair and The Washington Post have shrunk their culture desks. 

Many music journalists see fans attacking their work as another symptom of a society where culture criticism and journalism are devalued. In the age of streaming, for example, audiences no longer need music critics to tell them what album is worth buying or what concert is worth attending. 

“Our role has changed a lot with streaming,” said Hunt. “Before streaming, you really relied on critics to tell you whether something was a good use of your money, now I can just hop on Spotify and spend 40 minutes finding out for myself.” 

Biting the hand that feeds you

As Swift released her latest album, in her social media accounts she only endorsed one review: Rolling Stone’s which did not only give the album a fawning review, but also transformed “its digital presence into an immersive experience complete with reviews, lists, takes, and more” to celebrate the release of the album. This prompted many online to speculate that the positive review was bought by Swift and her team. 

Hunt said that an added dimension to music journalism today is that publications have to worry that if they write a negative review of a big artist's album, they will lose future access, not only to that specific artist but also to other artists on the record label. 

Another factor is that a record label may buy advertising space in a music publication which can create a financial codependency, particularly in an environment where less and less money is being put into journalism as a whole. 

“Publications need access to pull in the readers so they don't want to risk annoying whoever it may be for fear of getting locked out of future access,” Hunt said . “A lot of the power has kind of shifted in the direction of the PRs.”

Rashid, one of the journalists in South Korea, says that labels - at least in his country - are 100% aware of the issues surrounding super fans and the cyberbullying directed at critics, but choose not to address it. He suggests that this is due to financial considerations as “superfans are what generate revenue.” 

“They're guilty for not saying anything, by not trying to make a healthier system, and they thrive off these super fans who are going to buy all the merchandise and make them a lot of revenue,” he said. 

Everyone’s a critic

Music criticism has also been democratised by the internet. Audiences can now listen to multiple albums for the price of a streaming membership, and anyone with a social media account can publish their own review with the gumption and authority commanded by a career journalist. What is the point of music criticism, when everyone is a critic?

Despite the diminished role of professional critics, all the journalists I spoke to still defend the importance of their beat. LaPierre said that the role of the critic is to create a conversation around music and to help understand why a piece of art makes listeners feel a certain way. 

“There is a muddled understanding of what the function of music criticism is and a refusal to appreciate people wanting to engage with your art on a critical level,” LaPierre said. “It’s like the sort of person in your life that’s willing to give you direct, honest feedback about something. That’s exactly the kind of thing that people should be looking at and appreciating about music journalism.”

The fact that fans and artists engage with critics directly, even if it is negative, shows that music criticism still matters, says Jung, the music journalist from South Korea.  

Jung explained that when he writes a negative review, fans use it as a weapon against him. When it is a positive review, however, it is used as a marketing tool. Despite all the harassment he has endured from fans, he has not been deterred from criticising and writing about Korean pop music. 

“It's all for the love of the music, right?” Jung said.  “That’s how I view criticism. You criticise because you love the music and you want it to be good and improve.