Global influencer marketing spending

There is something quietly magnificent about the fact that the amount of money corporations are willing to spend convincing you to buy things has decided, apparently without discussion, to move in perfect synchronisation with how many times you streamed a song about a breakup in 2023. One might expect the universe to have better things to do. It does not.

What's actually happening here is rather more mundane and therefore somehow more interesting: both metrics are being lifted by the same rising tide of smartphone penetration, disposable income in developed markets, and the simple fact that there were just more people with internet access in 2024 than in 2017. Influencer marketing exploded as TikTok and Instagram became the primary nervous system through which teenagers and their parents received information about existence, while Taylor Swift released three albums in three years and became, by any reasonable measure, inescapable. The correlation isn't mystical—it's two independent consequences of the same underlying economic and technological expansion, riding the same wave like confused swimmers who keep bumping into each other.

What we're really looking at is a reminder that human pattern-seeking machinery is so sensitive it will find signal in what is essentially coincidence dressed up in a tuxedo. The fact that influencer marketing and Taylor Swift streams both grew robustly between 2017 and 2024 tells us almost nothing about why either of them happened individually. It tells us something rather different about our species' fondness for narrative. We do so want things to mean something.