Boys and their 1990s allowance-spending shift from music to video games spawned the rise of female artists such as Taylor Swift, who then “ruined music,” at least according to 1970s rocker Todd Rundgren.

“To me, Taylor Swift is the apotheosis of mediocrity,” the Utopia frontman told Vulture in a new interview ahead of his upcoming West Coast “Damned If I Do Tour,” adding, “There’s an argument to be made that she ruined music.”

Rundgren went on to say “It’s the era of the female artists,” and blamed the rise of video games for the music industry’s focus on music by and for women.

It all started when “boys stopped spending money on music and started spending it on video games,” which sent music marketers looking elsewhere for revenue, the “Hello It’s Me” and “I Saw the Light” singer explained. They then realized “there’s all these young girls and they’ve got their allowances, too,” he added.

“So you got Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, P!nk, and many artists of that ilk,” Rundgren continued, pegging classically trained pianist Lady Gaga as a “real musician.”

Swift, however, was to him a league apart.

“Taylor Swift doesn’t do anything particularly great except grow hair,” he said. “She’s not a great singer. She’s not a great songwriter. She’s not a great dancer. She’s a role model for what was a very young generation of women, and now for those women’s daughters as well, because it’s mothers and daughters going to Taylor Swift shows.”

Swift was at least in good company. Nearly 50 years ago, in 1977, Rundgren self-funded and produced Meat Loaf’s multiplatinum “Bat Out of Hell” to parody then-rising Bruce Springsteen.

The Boss, Rundgren believed, had set American music back 20 years with what he saw as a simplistic representation of a bygone time. In fact Rundgren only brought up Swift when asked who he would parody today if given the chance.

Swift’s hundreds of millions of worldwide fans are clearly touched by something in her music, as are Springsteen’s. Swift’s “The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore” deluxe version last week broke two Spotify records. Her single “Patient Zero” was the most-streamed song by a female artist in one day for 2026, making Swift the most-streamed female artist in one day, the music streamer announced.

On Sunday she became the most-awarded artist in MTV VMA history.

Rundgren rose to fame in the 1960s with blues-psychedelic garage band Nazz and pioneered innovative ways to weave technology into his music, experimenting with synthesizers and other sounds as he forged a distinctive path through various rock genres. He also founded and fronted Utopia in the 1970s and 1980s. He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2021, which hailed the 78-year-old musician and producer who “continues to redefine the sound of rock & roll through genre-melding songwriting and production.”

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