Gene Simmons knows the record business well. When KISS began in the early 1970s, they weren't popular, but their record company (Casablanca) stood behind them and kept funneling them money, and things worked out. Taylor Swift came up in a different era.
What makes any argument that Swift or KISS were not worthy of a versatile and vast audience moot is that both are good enough at writing songs and conceiving albums that they likely would have been popular in most eras. They aren't a product of their time; they helped form the culture of it.
In a recent interview with MusicRadar, however, Simmons says Taylor Swift is extremely popular because of the way the music industry works. Worse, he implies that Swift would not be very popular at all except for young girls who the industry manipulates into liking a certain kind of music.
KISS's Gene Simmons has a strange take on Taylor Swift and her fans
Simmons said, "When downloading and file-sharing happened, money disappeared. Record companies couldn't afford paying millions of dollars for an album, because if the whole album died, they'd lose everything. So they – the record companies – started concentrating on singles. Single songs which didn't need a lot of money, relatively speaking. And they also started concentrating on new fans – and new fans are mostly young girls."
There is a lot to unpack there, but Simmons doubled down, "So the largest live act performer of all time is Taylor Swift, who sings songs about heartbreak and stuff like that. But without the female audience – no Taylor!"
This isn't an argument about whether Gene Simmons is right or wrong about the music industry changing after services like Napster came to be. What we stream and hear on the radio now is singles-driven, whether that be a record company producing a song or an independent artist.
But the record business wasn't always about albums either. In the early years of rock, singles also drove sales, and album sales did not become a massive seller for nearly a decade. Once the record companies found they could make more money that way, they changed the industry.
The same has happened since streaming services became the primary way many people listen to music. Record companies adapt to what the public is doing because they are in the business to make money. That doesn't make it organically good, of course, but that is how companies work.
As far as Taylor Swift not having much of an audience without young girls because they somehow identify with her tracks about breakups and relationships, that simply isn't true. The same argument might have been made about the Beatles when they first became big in the United States. That band turned out to have a long run of success.
The same holds true of Taylor Swift. She has been successful for more than a decade because of her talent and business acumen. She will continue to be because she is honest to her music, just as KISS was.