How Taylor Swift went from pop celebrity to most famous person on the planet
She is the undisputed queen of the music industry right now, and an off-brand decision Taylor Swift made just over three years ago helped make it happen.
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At tea time, everybody agrees: It’s Taylor Swift’s world and we’re all just living in it.
There is surely not a single person on the planet right now as culturally significant as the 12-time Grammy winner.
To make a bold statement, there probably never has been.
As this writer shimmied to Love Story on the dancefloor at a wedding in Queensland recently, a 20-something male surfer type could be heard proudly declaring, “I didn’t understand why people liked Taylor before but now I’m actually a fan.”
Surfer type’s comments are indicative of a much more wide-scale shift, in which an entirely new demographic of people have recently entered a long-existing fold – the Swiftie fandom.
Swift has been a force in music for 17 years, beloved by her diehard fanbase for her honest lyrics and catchy pop beats she’s churned out again-and-again.
But all of a sudden, Swift’s talent is more widely understood – and respected – than ever before.
While Swift has held a level of fame among the likes of fellow powerhouses Beyonce and Adele for much of her career, it could be argued she was a ‘celebrity’ throughout the 2010s, talked about for her dating exploits rather than her musical nous.
Swift herself waded into this in 2019, saying: “When I was like 23, people were just reducing me to making slideshows of my dating life and putting people in there that I’d sat next to at a party once, and deciding that my songwriting was a trick, rather than a skill and a craft.”
What can’t be argued now is that Swift, now 33, has jumped off the page of tabloids and broken into another exosphere, where only the likes of The Beatles and Elvis Presley have ventured.
Since 2018 to date, Swift’s average daily streams in Australia have increased by a whopping 699 per cent, according to data provided to news.com.au by Spotify.
Google reports show Swift has been the most “influential” celebrity of 2023, with an average of 4.5 million monthly searches in the US alone – light-years ahead of her nearest competitors Elon Musk (2.8m searches) and LeBron James (2.7m searches).
Her extreme popularity also has a ‘Taylor effect’ on those in her inner circle, with her new boyfriend, NFL player Travis Kelce, seeing a 400 per cent spike in sales on his Kansas City Chiefs jerseys after being linked to Swift in September.
The NFL, which relished in record ratings when Swift was present at games, has unashamedly capitalised on the Taylor effect, playing her songs at matches, using a photo of Swift in its Twitter profile thumbnail and changing their social bio to “NFL (Taylor’s Version)”.
So high is demand for endless Swift content, USA Today recently hired a ‘Taylor Swift reporter’ who exclusively writes about the superstar.
Again, there is no-one the world over who has ever held such a grip on pop culture.
So when, and how, did Swift transition from bubblegum pop princess, to one of the most famous people to ever exist?
All signs point to Swift’s blockbuster Eras Tour propelling her to other-worldly heights of super stardom (and it’s played a huge role), but the tour is only part of a clever chain of events the singer triggered just over three years ago with the surprise release of her pandemic album, folklore, in July 2020.
At the time, Swift would’ve been embarking on a global tour for her 2019 album, Lover, another pop instalment to her dazzling discography.
Instead, she was forced to cancel the shows and retreat at home like the rest of us.
While we were all perfecting banana bread, Swift was finetuning a work of art that would become her legacy.
Four months after the Covid-19 pandemic plunged the world into a stalemate, Swift unexpectedly dropped her 8th studio album, which she casually announced on Instagram.
In an off-brand, soft unveiling for someone who had a tendency for theatrics (Bad Blood music video, anyone?) – folklore had no marketing. No press. No blockbuster tour to go with it.
At the time, Swift acknowledged she was dubious about the timing, saying she previously would’ve “agonised” over an ideal album rollout. But given the unstable state of the world, she went with her gut, which was telling her to put out something she loved in the hopes others would love it too.
Unintentionally, the timing of folklore’s release ended up being a masterstroke.
Listeners – starved for fresh content outside of news bulletins – had time and space to digest something as emotionally complex and erratic as the crisscrossed stories Swift wove.
These same listeners were going through their own life-altering changes brought on by the pandemic, whether such changes evoked ecstasy or agony, folklore spoke to them all.
August added an oft-forgotten layer to a headline love story. This Is Me Trying exposed a shadowy corner of the human mind, neglected over fears of vulnerability. Exile featuring Bon Iver, underrated as one of the most tortured duets in recent memory, provided all at once a tune you could scream to in a crowd of thousands, but equally, sit silently at pains over misunderstandings bringing a relationship undone.
folklore was a shiny new toy, luring fans who otherwise mightn’t have tuned into a Swift special.
Further, the change of pace and sound shake-up showed critics (and the indifferent), Swift was more than a pop star – she was an artist.
There was not a single ‘radio friendly’ pop song on the album, something big record companies would never have signed off on (luckily, Swift was releasing music independently at this point).
And yet, folklore broke the record for the biggest opening day on Spotify for an album by a female act. It later won the Grammy for Best Album, and saw Swift become the world’s highest paid solo musician that year.
Its popularity further deepened Swifties’ devotion to the former country singer, who were proud to have seen her greatness from the get-go.
In a few short years time, folklore (and its sister album evermore, released just months later to equal fanfare) would give Swift a clear ‘era’ to build the summit she’s been standing on since March when Eras Tour kicked off in North America.
Swift finally became a billionaire in October, in part thanks to her album re-releases as well as her hugely successful tour, which generated roughly $US700 million in ticket sales for her northern US leg alone (she’s currently embarking on the South American leg before jetting around the world with 84 shows).
Her billion club status came at a rapid rate, with Forbes estimating the star was worth $US280 million a few short years ago in 2017.
Swift is set to bring the concerts to Australia in February, performing seven sold-out shows across Sydney and Melbourne – marking her first time on our shores since 2018’s Reputation tour.
The general public sale for her Aussie concerts back in June sparked never-before-seen pandemonium for tickets, with around 600,000 people getting their hands on them against the four million who attempted their luck (that’s one in six Australians who are Swifties).
It also heralded the biggest streaming month ever for Swift in Australia, with over 136 million streams for her music on Spotify in July alone.
“As one of the world’s most decorated and celebrated artists of today’s generation, there’s no denying that Taylor Swift has firmly cemented herself as a music and cultural icon,” said Spotify Australia Head of Music Alicia Sbrugnera.
“In 2022 she took out the number one accolade as Australia’s most-streamed artist on Spotify from around the globe. This year she became the first female artist in Spotify history to reach 100 million monthly listeners, while her hit track Cruel Summer made the Spotify Billions Club.
“With the Eras Tour en route to Australia in 2024, we can only expect her global domination to continue to make and break Spotify’s streaming charts.”
To quote Swift’s defiant banger to the haters, Karma really is a Queen.
Taylor Swift’s top 5 most streamed songs in Australia:
Data provided by Spotify
1. Shake it off
2. Blank Space
3. Anti-Hero
4. Cruel Summer
5. Lover
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