Todd Rundgren Says Taylor Swift ‘Ruined Music’

Todd Rundgren, the singer-songwriter and producer behind hits like “Hello It’s Me” and “I Saw the Light,” recently slammed Taylor Swift, calling the pop star “the apotheosis of mediocrity” and claiming that she “ruined music.”

“To me, Taylor Swift is the apotheosis of mediocrity,” Rundgren said in an interview with Vulture. “It’s the era of the female artists.”

Rundgren 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 “Bat Out of Hell” by Meat Loaf in 1977 and famously said he didn’t care if it succeeded or not because he wanted to make fun of Bruce Springsteen.) “Taylor Swift, of course,” he responded. “There’s an argument to be made that she ruined music. It’s an understandable phenomenon.”

He continued to explain that the biggest artists in the world are now female “because of video games.”

“Back in the ’90s, boys stopped spending money on music and started spending it on video games, and that left the music market with, ‘Well, where do we go here?’ And they said, ‘Well, there’s all these young girls and they’ve got their allowances, too,” he said. “Why don’t we start making music for young girls instead of Pearl Jam or something like that?”

Rundgren’s comments come on the heels of Swift’s most recent musical release, “The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore.” She broke two Spotify records thanks to the deluxe version of her 2025 album: the new release “Patient Zero” 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.

At the 2026 MTV VMAs, Swift was honored with the inaugural Artist-Director Award.