In her glittering prime
Everyone wants to know why Taylor Swift is so popular. Here are some answers.
In a 2014 review of “Blank Space”, the second of three #1 hits from Taylor Swift’s 1989, Slate music critic Chris Molanphy wrote that Swift was in her imperial moment, a time in an artist’s career where they’re on top of the world and everything they touch turns to gold. The review’s title is simply “Why Is Taylor Swift’s ‘Blank Space’ No. 1?” but an alternate title that appears when you scroll several pages back in Slate’s “Why Is This Song No. 1?” tag sums up the imperial era even more succintly:
Taylor Swift has been popular and famous for just about her entire career, with her 2006 debut album launching her to country stardom and pop crossover following soon after. But, at least until the last few years, the 1989 album cycle looked like a career peak that she seemed unlikely to repeat, and if you’d revisited Molanphy’s piece, say, five years after the fact, that headline would have seemed entirely accurate. Though Swift was one of the most successful artists in pop music for many years before and many years after, the period from 2014 to 2016 was the only time that she was indisputably the biggest artist in the world.
As popular as Swift was in the late 2000s and early 2010s, she was one of many highly successful popstars of that era, with several peers outdoing her in terms of chart hits. By the time Taylor Swift scored her first #1 single in 2012, Katy Perry had scored seven #1 hits, and Rihanna’s chart-topper count had reached double digits. Later, in the second half of the 2010s, hip hop eclipsed pop in popularity, and rappers like Drake and eventual Swift collaborator Post Malone dominated the charts, while in the pop sphere, the one-two punch of Sweetener and thank u, next put Ariana Grande firmly on Swift’s level. In the aggregate, Taylor Swift was arguably the most consistently popular artist of the 2010s, with even her least successful projects doing numbers that most artists would envy, but at the close of the decade, it looked like she was unlikely to reach the heights of the 1989 era again.
But, of course, she did.
Today, Taylor Swift is easily the most popular musician in the world, and it’s not even close. Her Eras Tour is the highest-grossing music tour of all time, and the tour movie is the highest-grossing concert film. When she breaks streaming records, she’s not dethroning another artist, she’s just beating her own personal best.1 Her only real competition for biggest artist of the 2010s, Drake, conceded conceded in a recent song that she’s bigger than he is. USA Today hired a dedicated Taylor Swift reporter. Harvard is now offers a class on her music. Time named her Person of the Year last year. I could go on, but after the first four or five, each new superlative starts to raise more questions than it answers.
Even as a longtime fan2 who completely understands Swift’s appeal and counts her as one of my favourite artists, her current level of fame is kind of crazy. Why is she still so popular a decade after her previous peak and nearly two decades into her career? Why is there no one else on her level? And how long can this last?
I. Long story short
I’m about to give a very long and detailed answer to these questions, but to summarise:
In this fractured media environment, established stars who built their audiences before the streaming era have a big advantage over new ones.
Taylor Swift was one of the most popular artists of the immediate pre-streaming era, and by certain metrics, she was arguably the biggest artist in pop music for far longer than just her 1989 era imperial moment.
From the beginning of her career, Swift cultivated an incredibly loyal and dedicated fanbase who have stuck with her through thick and thin.
Swift’s genre experimentation on folklore and evermore and the nostalgia factor inherent in her re-recorded albums helped to expand her fanbase, while Midnights’ return to broad-appeal pop music was a huge success with the general public.
Constant media coverage of Swift’s music, tour, chart achievements, and personal life — particularly her relationship with Travis Kelce — helped increase her fame and popularity, which created even more incentive for the media to cover her.
Read on for detailed explanations of all of these points, as well as an exploration of where Swift could go from here, using the current careers of other former superstars as possible blueprints.
II. We were both young when I first saw you
I bring this up every single time I write about contemporary pop music, but the internet in general and streaming in particular changed everything about music and how we engage with it. I covered how streaming has made it much easier for listeners to explore less popular artists and genres in my poptimism piece last year.
There, I discussed how streaming has impacted non-pop artists who don’t get radio play and previously had to rely on reviews from publications like Pitchfork to introduce them to potential fans. But streaming has affected popular artists too, and not only because listeners who were always kind of lukewarm on pop but listened to it because it was on the radio now have other options.
I would describe myself as a pop music fan, in that some of my favourite artists are pop singers and there are a lot of pop artists whose work I follow, but the way that I engage with pop music now is completely different from how I engaged with it before the streaming era. I haven’t listened to pop music totally unfiltered, without the ability to skip songs I’m not feeling or totally avoid artists I don’t like, since university, when I used to watch The Edge on the little TV in the kitchen of my student flat while I cooked dinner and did the dishes. That was eight years ago, and since then I’ve only listened to pop music of my own volition, which means if I listen to a song or an artist once and decide they’re not for me, I never have to listen to them again if I don’t want to.
The internet and YouTube and iTunes and The Pirate Bay have existed for the entire time that I’ve been listening to pop music, so my pop experience was always more skewed towards stuff that I like compared to that of a pop listener in the pre-internet age, but it used to be that you could only access those things on your computer, which you didn’t have with you 24/7. Now most people have smartphones and smart TVs and bluetooth speakers and can watch and listen to content of their own choice whenever and wherever they want.
The fact that even pop fans can avoid the pop songs and artists they’re not into limits the audience of newer artists, which means that established stars have a big advantage over newcomers. That’s why artists who built their fanbases before the cultural fracturing of the streaming era, like Taylor Swift and Drake, who had their first hits in the 2000s, and Beyoncé, who had hers in the 90s, are still the biggest superstars in music. The atomised nature of the streaming era means that new artists simply don’t have the same reach as their monoculture-era predecessors.
Streaming also means that listeners don’t age out of pop music the way they used to. It used to be that changing trends would eventually alienate many older listeners, whose taste in music had become more rigid with age. At that point, those listeners would often just stop listening to new pop music. But because it’s much easier for listeners to keep up with new releases in the streaming era, people my age3 and older have continued to follow the artists they listened to in their youth past the peak of their careers, which helped millennial pop icons stay relevant into the 2020s.
Almost all of the biggest popstars of the late 2000s and early 2010s have either had #1 hits this decade or come very close. Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Justin Bieber, Nicki Minaj, Lady Gaga, Adele and Miley Cyrus have all had at least one chart-topping hit this decade, with Swift, Beyoncé, Bieber and Minaj scoring multiple #1s, while Rihanna peaked at #2 and even Britney Spears made the top 10. The fact that Katy Perry hasn’t enjoyed the same longevity as most of her peers4 is seen as a weird aberration, and Witness, her first unsuccessful album cycle, is constantly discussed and re-examined by pop fans, when historically, it was actually very normal for a superstar to see a marked decline in popularity after their imperial phase came to an end.
This isn’t the first time that one generation has continued driving the pop music conversation well into adulthood. The baby boomers, particularly older boomers born in the late ’40s and early ’50s, also retained their influence on music into their twenties and thirties, and they kept the most popular artists of their formative years relevant for a long time, largely due to the sheer size of the baby boom generation. Artists like Paul McCartney and Diana Ross, who had been superstars since the early ’60s, remained consistent hitmakers until the early ’80s, twenty years into their careers, and other boomer favourites like George Harrison and The Beach Boys managed to score one-off smashes as late as 1988.
III. Who’s Taylor Swift anyway?
Those factors explain why an artist who has been an A-list popstar since 2008 is still on top of the world in 2024, but why this artist in particular?
Earlier, I said that Taylor Swift didn’t become the biggest artist in the world until the 1989 era, and that is definitely true — by certain metrics. If we’re looking at hit songs, perhaps the most obvious way to judge a popstar’s fame, Swift was less successful than some of her peers early in her career. But by certain metrics, Taylor Swift has been the most successful artist in pop music for almost her entire career, and it just so happens that those metrics are now the ones that matter most.
As I write this, only twenty-four albums have ever sold over a million copies in a single week. The first album to achieve this feat was Whitney Houston’s The Bodyguard Soundtrack in 1992, and more than six years would pass before another album did the same. The late ’90s and early 2000s were the heyday of the million-seller, with thirteen albums selling over a million copies in one week between 1998 and 2005. Garth Brooks, Britney Spears, Limp Bizkit, The Beatles, Norah Jones, Usher and 50 Cent all had one album sell over a million copies in one week during this period, while The Backstreet Boys, NSYNC and Eminem each achieved this rare feat twice. After 50 Cent’s The Massacre sold over a million copies in one week in 2005, three years passed without another album doing the same, and it looked at the time like the million-sales-in-a-week era might be over. The culprits were two internet innovations: illegal filesharing, which meant listeners could download music without paying for it, and Apple’s iTunes store, which allowed users to purchase individual tracks rather than entire albums.
Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter III finally ended the million-seller drought in 2008, but since then, only three more artists have gone on to sell over a million copies of one album in a single week: Lady Gaga with Born This Way, Adele with 25, and Taylor Swift with Speak Now and Red and 1989 and reputation. After reputation, which many believed only sold that many copies in 2017 because it was initially not available on streaming services,5 there was another long drought during which it again seemed like the million-seller era was over. Five years passed before another album sold over a million copies in a single week, and do I even need to tell you that it was Taylor Swift? Her 2022 album Midnights sold over a million copies in its first week, and she’s since done it again with 1989 (Taylor’s Version) and The Tortured Poets Department. If you’ve lost count, that’s seven albums, and remember, only four artists have ever had more than one album sell over a million copies in a single week, and the others only had two. Taylor Swift equalled that record in 2012, before her supposed imperial era had even started, and the first time she sold a million copies in one week was way back in 2010, when she was still a country singer.
The other measure by which Taylor Swift has always been the most successful artist of her generation is the album bomb. An album bomb is when multiple songs from one album simultaneously hit the singles chart. This only became possible in the mid-2000s, when iTunes purchases meant that any song on an album, even if it wasn’t released as a single and didn’t get any radio play, could chart if enough people bought it. The earliest album bombs were tied to film and television franchises, the first being the High School Musical soundtrack, which had seven songs enter the chart at once in February 2006, and Hannah Montana, High School Musical 2, Alvin and the Chipmunks, American Idol, and Camp Rock chart bombs followed over the next couple of years.6
The first album bomb not associated with a movie or TV show was Taylor Swift’s Fearless, which debuted seven songs in the Hot 100 on November 29, 2008.7 Since Fearless, Taylor Swift has continued her record-breaking album bombs, with Speak Now being the first album to have its entire tracklist chart,8 Midnights becoming the first album to occupy the entire top 10, and The Tortured Poets Department taking the top 14 spots, but in some ways, the Fearless album bomb is her most impressive one. You’ve got to remember that album bombs are always very frontloaded, based on sales (and, later on, streams) immediately following an album’s release. The fans buying Fearless on iTunes when it came out hadn’t heard Fearless yet, which meant Taylor Swift already had a large, dedicated fanbase who were buying her music in droves based solely on her self-titled debut album and the Fearless lead single “Love Story”. This happened in a world where the iconic “You Belong With Me” music video didn’t yet exist!
I noted earlier that it took until 2012 for Taylor Swift to have her first #1 hit, by which point most of her peers had scored several, some of them in record numbers. In fact, of the early 2010s pop pantheon that I listed above, the only artists who had their first #1 hit after Swift were Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber, and Nicki Minaj. Of those four artists, three — Swift, Cyrus and Bieber — first achieved fame as teenagers, started off with young fanbases and family-friendly personas, and only topped the chart once they’d started to shed their teenybopper image.9
Right now, songs chart on the Hot 100 due to a combination of streaming, sales, and radio play; prior to 2013, only sales and radio contributed. Stars with teenage audiences generally get less radio play than artists with all-ages audiences, hindering their performance on the chart. This is why Taylor Swift’s early Hot 100 achievements were digital-download-driven album bombs rather than radio-powered chart-toppers. A large casual listenership better translates to radio hits, but artists with dedicated young fans can count on them to buy albums and to stick around as their career progresses. That’s why Swift has always towered over the rest of the field when it comes to album sales, and it’s part of why she’s remained so popular for so long.
On top of this, Taylor Swift was more palatable to casual and adult listeners than most teen idols, which meant that she didn’t have to wait as long as Justin Bieber or Harry Styles to score her first #1 hit, nor did it take a drastic “I’m an adult now” image revamp like Miley Cyrus’s. And good thing it didn’t, because Swift’s gradual aesthetic and sonic evolution made it easier for the fanbase she’d been courting since the beginning to follow her on her journey from country ingenue to world-conquering popstar.
IV. Fighting dragons with you
That Taylor Swift has one of the largest and most dedicated fandoms in all of pop culture is no accident. From the beginning of her career, Swift worked to cultivate a loyal fandom who were invested in not just Taylor Swift the artist, but Taylor Swift the person. She engaged directly with fans on social media, first on MySpace, and later on Twitter and Tumblr, where she regularly liked and commented on fans’ posts about her. She held listening parties dubbed “secret sessions” during the 1989, reputation and Lover rollouts, where she invited fans into her home, played the then-unreleased album for them, explained the inspirations behind her songs, took photographs with them, introduced them to her family and her cats, and shared home-baked cookies with them. Even in her world-conquering imperial era, Swift’s fan engagement prevented her from seeming remote or untouchable, and kept her initial appeal as a normal girl who young fans could see themselves being friends with from diminishing. Obviously, she couldn’t comment on every fan’s social media posts, and she definitely couldn’t invite all of her fans to the secret sessions, but seeing her do these things helped to make a good impression on fans who didn’t get to interact with her themselves.
Taylor Swift also had other ways of communicating with her broader fanbase. Starting with her very first album, she capiTalised certAin letters in her lYric bookLets, which, when read tOgether, spelled out secRet messages. These hidden messages were often clues as to who or what each song was about, and the fact that Swift shared this information cryptically rather than saying it outright in an interview that anyone could read made fans feel like she was letting them in on a secret. As well as strengthening the relationship between Swift and her fans, these hidden messages — which could be found in every lyric booklet from her debut album to 1989 — may have incentivised some fans to buy physical CD copies, which was good for album sales. Later in her career, Swift would include other hints and clues, known by fans as “easter eggs”, in her music videos, social media posts, and even her clothing.
Of course, all the hidden messages, listening parties, and MySpace posts in the world wouldn’t mean anything if fans didn’t feel a connection to her music. Swift’s knack for memorable lyrics, catchy melodies and storytelling gave her cross-demographic appeal, but from the start, it was her diaristic songwriting, which touched on ordinary teenage concerns — crushes, friends, family, and high school — that won her a following among fellow teenage girls who related to her lyrics and admired her authenticity, especially because she wrote her own songs and made this fact a part of her brand. Teen starlets are nothing new in pop music, but as a young woman in country music, a genre dominated by male artists,10 Swift was a breath of fresh air for many young female country fans.
When Taylor Swift moved away from country music, she did so gradually — the gulf between “Tim McGraw” and “Blank Space” is a vast one, and she’d have alienated a lot of fans by making that jump immediately, but the incremental changes from album to album, combined with her songwriting style and public persona staying relatively consistent with each new release, allowed original Swifties to slowly acclimatise themselves to her new pop sound, and each new album brought in enough fans that the country purists who did jump ship were very much outnumbered. Swift’s fanbase, including both obsessives and casuals, has now grown to encompass more than half of all American adults, with a 2023 survey finding that 53% would describe themselves as Taylor Swift fans.
Taylor Swift’s die-hard fans would stick with her through thick and thin even if her star dimmed and she was no longer as popular as she is today — and that’s not an educated guess or a prediction, it’s something that already happened. After her 2016 feud with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, which punctured Swift’s good girl image and turned the internet against her, it seemed possible that she would see a career downturn. In fact, that was already on the cards before the feud-inflicted reputational damage — trends were changing, music was different, all imperial phases must come to an end. But while 2017’s reputation and 2019’s Lover may not have recaptured the success of 1989, they were the bestselling albums of their respective years, and proved that Swift’s fandom was so entrenched that her most loyal fans could be counted on to keep listening, and many casual listeners either didn’t know or didn’t care about the mostly online drama surrounding her.
V. I watched it begin again
Though Taylor Swift’s late 2010s low point only proved that Swift at her lowest was still more popular and successful than almost any other artist, her current mega-stardom comes as a result of a couple of recent developments. First, in 2020, Swift released two surprise albums, folklore and evermore, which saw her doing good, on some new shit, exploring new sounds and collaborators, with Aaron Dessner of indie rock band The National producing both albums. I’ve discussed the flaws in the popular narrative that Swift’s indie albums won critics over — she was already widely acclaimed long before folklore — but they certainly broadened her listenership and gained her some new fans among the general public, particularly indie fans who liked The National and Bon Iver but didn’t know Swift beyond her pop hits.
Meanwhile, following her masters dispute with Big Machine Records, Taylor Swift began recording new versions of her first six albums, releasing her first re-recorded album, Fearless (Taylor’s Version) in 2021, with Red (Taylor’s Version) following later that year, and re-recorded versions of Speak Now and 1989 seeing release in 2023 — the same year Swift’s Eras Tour, which unlike her previous tours focused on all of her albums instead of just the most recent one, began. Swift’s aim with the re-recording project was to finally own master recordings of her earliest albums after the originals were sold, but the Taylor’s Versions — which include re-recorded versions of the original tracklist, plus a number of previously-unheard bonus tracks ostensibly written around the same time as the original album — proved to be an ingenious piece of marketing.
A huge number of Swifties, especially those who have been fans from the beginning, are millennials, and millennials love nostalgia, so an entire multi-album promotional campaign centred around reliving the favourite songs of their youth has naturally proved to be a winning strategy. Meanwhile, younger listeners get to participate in album rollouts for music that was originally released before some of them were born, which has helped Swift stay relevant among today’s youth in a way that most artists of her generation aren’t. While streaming has made listening to older music easier than ever, getting to experience every part of the album rollout in real time — counting down to release day, watching new music videos as they premiere on YouTube, dissecting the lyrics of the vault tracks and seeing how they add to the album’s larger storyline, and discussing it all in online fan communities — is fun, and it gives young fans a stronger connection to these albums than they otherwise may have had.
The amount of music Taylor Swift has released the past five years is another factor in her popularity. Between 2006 and 2019, Swift released seven albums, with two-year gaps between most of them and a three-year gap between 1989 and reputation. Since 2019, she has released at least one album every year, and often more, with two original albums in 2020 and two re-recorded albums each in 2021 and 2023. This year’s The Tortured Poets Department, though technically one album, has a deluxe edition with 15 extra tracks on top of the original 16, and many fans see this second batch of songs as essentially a second album.
In 2022, having expanded her listenership with her indie experimentation and nostalgic re-releases and kept herself on the public’s radar with multiple albums per year, Taylor Swift released Midnights, her first album of original pop material since Lover, which became the first album in five years to sell over a million copies in a single week and spawned more big hits than any of her albums since 1989.11 With Midnights, Swift’s new imperial phase was well and truly underway, just in time for her to announce the Eras Tour.
VI. All eyes on us
Taylor Swift’s prolific release schedule and record-breaking tour weren’t the only things that kept her in the news in 2023. Throughout her career, much has been written about her many public relationships, in news headlines, gossip blogs, and of course Swift’s own songs. This lessened somewhat after 2016, when Swift began a long-term relationship with actor Joe Alwyn, who was far less famous than most of her previous partners. But in April 2023, just a couple of weeks into the Eras Tour, it was announced that Swift and Alwyn had broken up, and shortly thereafter, Swift was linked to Matty Healy, lead singer of pop rock band The 1975. After this brief relationship, which appears to have inspired many of the songs on Swift’s latest album, the two broke up, and Swift began dating NFL player Travis Kelce.
Taylor Swift’s relationship with Kelce has been a boost to both her fame and his, with her appearances at his Kansas City Chiefs games receiving extensive media coverage. Obviously, the NFL is already incredibly popular in the US, but Swift’s presence led to not only a bump in domestic viewership, but increased attention internationally, including in countries where American football isn’t that popular. I live in New Zealand, and I have never seen the sport on the news here as much as it was during the past season, and the story hook was almost always Taylor and Travis. Kelce and the Chiefs made it all the way to the Super Bowl and won the game, which was of course a massive news story.
All of this contributed to the many incentives media outlets had to cover Swift, leading to more headlines, which made her more famous, which gave the media more reason to cover her, ad infinitum until Taylor Swift was the most written-about person in 2023, which led to her being named Time magazine’s person of the year, which in turn generated more articles and thinkpieces. Even articles about how we need to be more normal about Taylor Swift contributed to the Taylor Swift media domination.
VII. Looking backward might be the only way to move forward
So, where to from here? Taylor Swift is on top of the world and it would be crazy to bet against her right now, but no imperial phase lasts forever. One day, she’s going to release an album that doesn’t sell as many copies or break as many records as her recent work, but after the long, wildly successful career she’s had so far, she’s almost guaranteed to maintain some level of success for as long as she lives. Though we won’t know for sure how her future plays out until it happens, we can look to the recent careers of a couple of other artists who used to be huge superstars for clues.
A good model for what Swift’s career will look like after her star fades a little is Eminem. In his prime, he was one of the biggest names in music, and he remains the most commercially successful rapper of all time. His hot streak lasted into the early 2010s, but he’s no longer a consistent hitmaker — he still scores chart hits, but not chart-toppers, and only occasionally gets as high as the top 10 — and nor does he drive the cultural conversation like he used to. Still, every album he’s released since the year 2000 has topped the albums chart and gone platinum, and the fanbase he built up during his imperial phase is so large and so loyal that I don’t expect that to change anytime soon. I imagine that five to ten years from now, Taylor Swift may be in a similar position.
In the longer term, another possible model for Swift’s future career is Paul McCartney. As a member of The Beatles, McCartney was a part of the most commercially successful act in the history of recorded music, and he had the most successful solo career of his bandmates, remaining one of the biggest artists in the world throughout the ’70s and into the early ’80s. McCartney is now more than four decades removed from his prime, and he doesn’t touch the singles chart unless he’s collaborating with younger artists, but he still boasts impressive album sales. His most recent album, McCartney III, topped the album chart in his native UK, while his previous album, Egypt Station, was #1 in the US. Every album he’s released in the past 20 years has charted in the top 10 in both countries, with all but one making the top five.
McCartney is now over 80 years old, and his track record proves that if an artist has enough fans who loyally stick around after the end of their imperial era, they can carry that success forward for as long as they live. I wouldn’t be surprised if Taylor Swift does the same.
With her new album The Tortured Poets Department, Swift broke the Spotify record for most-streamed album in a single day, previously held by her own album Midnights, and the record for most-streamed artist in a single day, previously held by Swift on the day that her album 1989 (Taylor’s Version) was released.
I started getting into pop music around the time Fearless came out, and I liked the singles from that album and Speak Now, but only really became a full-blown Swiftie with Red.
28.
The only early 2010s “main pop girl” besides Perry who hasn’t scored any major hits this decade is Kesha, whose career downturn can largely be attributed to the sexual abuse lawsuit she filed against her longtime producer Dr. Luke in 2014.
Adele’s 25 was also initially unavailable on streaming, and that is likely the reason that that album sold over a million copies in multiple weeks, something that no other album has ever done.
Some of these aren’t super obvious unless you’re familiar with the cast members of these movies or the winner and runner up of American Idol’s seventh season. Apologies to anyone who wasn’t a preteen in the High School Musical era and doesn’t automatically know the names to look for on the charts.
Weird coincidence: this isn’t the first time I’ve referenced that exact week’s Hot 100 chart on this Substack. In my hair metal piece, I mentioned that Guns N’ Roses’ “Chinese Democracy” debuted at #34 and spent one week in the top 40 in 2008, and it turns out that it was the very same week that Taylor Swift’s Fearless album bomb happened.
If some familiar names appear to be missing among the ten Speak Now tracks that debuted on November 13, 2010, that’s because the title track, “Back to December”, “Mean” and “Mine” were released before the album and charted months earlier, and only “Mine” was still on the chart at the time of the album bomb.
Nicki Minaj was in her late 20s when she had her first hits, and her surprisingly long path to #1 is a discussion for another day.
While Swift technically had more Hot 100 chart entries with other albums in the intervening years, Midnights had more stable, long-running hits than any album since 1989. In 2023, three Midnights singles (along with Lover sleeper hit “Cruel Summer”) appeared on the Year-End Hot 100, which was her best showing since five 1989 singles appeared on the 2015 Year-End chart.