Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift (born December 13, 1989) is an American singer-songwriter. An influential figure in popular culture, she is known for her autobiographical songwriting and artistic reinventions. Swift is the highest-grossing live music artist, the wealthiest female musician, and one of the best-selling music artists of all time.

Swift signed with Big Machine Records in 2005 and debuted as a country singer with the albums Taylor Swift (2006) and Fearless (2008). The singles “Teardrops on My Guitar”, “Love Story”, and “You Belong with Me” found crossover success on country and pop radio formats. Speak Now (2010)

expanded her country pop sound with rock influences, and Red (2012) featured a pop-friendly production. Swift recalibrated her artistic identity from country to pop with the synth-pop album 1989 (2014); ensuing media scrutiny inspired the hip-hop-imbued Reputation (2017). Through the 2010s, she accumulated the US Billboard Hot 100 number-one singles “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”, “Shake It Off”, “Blank Space”, “Bad Blood”, and “Look What You Made Me Do”.

Shifting to Republic Records in 2018, Swift released the eclectic pop album Lover (2019) and re-recorded four of the first six albums due to a dispute with Big Machine. She ventured into indie folk with the 2020 albums Folklore and Evermore, and dominated record charts with the electropop record Midnights (2022), the double album The Tortured Poets Department (2024), and the soft rock-tinged The Life of a Showgirl (2025).

The singles “Cardigan”, “Willow”, “All Too Well (10 Minute Version)”, “Anti-Hero”, “Cruel Summer”, “Is It Over Now?”, “Fortnight”, and “The Fate of Ophelia” topped the Hot 100. Her Eras Tour (2023–2024) is the first concert tour ever to earn a billion-dollar revenue, and its associated film, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (2023), became the highest-grossing concert film in history.

Swift is the only artist to have been named the IFPI Global Recording Artist of the Year five times. A record eight of her albums have each sold over a million copies first-week in the US. Publications such as Rolling Stone and Billboard have ranked Swift among the greatest artists of all time. She is the first individual from the arts to be named Time Person of

the Year (2023). Her accolades include 14 Grammy Awards—including a record four Album of the Year wins—and a Primetime Emmy Award. Swift is the most-awarded artist of the American Music Awards, the Billboard Music Awards, and the MTV Video Music Awards. A subject of extensive media coverage, she has a global fanbase known as Swifties.

Life and career

Early life

Taylor Alison Swift was born on December 13, 1989, in West Reading, Pennsylvania. She is named after the singer-songwriter James Taylor; her parents chose a unisex name, hoping it would help her succeed in business. Her father, Scott Kingsley Swift, was a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch, and her mother, Andrea Gardner Swift (née Finlay), worked as a mutual fund marketing executive. Swift’s younger brother, Austin, is an actor. The siblings are of Scottish, English, and German descent, with distant Italian and Irish ancestry. Their maternal grandmother, Marjorie Finlay (née Moehlenkamp), was an opera singer whose singing in church became one of Swift’s earliest memories of music.

During childhood, Swift spent her holiday seasons on a Christmas tree farm in Pennsylvania, and summers at her family’s vacation home in Stone Harbor, New Jersey, where she occasionally performed acoustic songs at a local coffee shop. Raised Christian, she attended preschool and kindergarten at a Montessori school run by

The Bernardine Sisters of St. Francis before transferring to the Wyndcroft School in Pottstown. When her family moved to Wyomissing, she attended Wyomissing Area Junior/Senior High School. At age nine, she aspired to a career in musical theater, performing at local festivals and in Berks Youth Theatre Academy productions, and traveling regularly to New York City for vocal and acting lessons. After watching a documentary about Faith Hill, she changed her goal and became determined to pursue a country music career in Nashville, Tennessee.

At the age of 11, Swift traveled to Nashville with her mother to visit record labels and submit demo tapes of Dolly Parton and Dixie Chicks karaoke covers. She was rejected by all the labels, which led her to focus on songwriting. She started learning the guitar at the age of 12 with the help of a computer repairman and local musician who assisted Swift with

writing an original song. In 2003, she and her parents started working with the talent manager Dan Dymtrow. With his help, Swift modeled for Abercrombie & Fitch, had an original song included on a Maybelline compilation CD, and was given an artist development deal from RCA Records at 13. To help Swift break into the country music scene, her father transferred to Merrill Lynch’s Nashville office when she was 14 years old, and the family relocated to Hendersonville, Tennessee. Swift attended Hendersonville High School for two years before transferring to Aaron Academy, which offered homeschooling.

2004–2008: Career beginnings and Taylor Swift

Swift signed to Sony/ATV Tree Music Publishing in 2004; at 14, she became the youngest signee in the publishing company’s history. In Nashville, she worked with experienced Music Row songwriters, including Liz Rose. Rose and Swift would write songs every Tuesday afternoon after school. After one year on the development deal, she left RCA Records, who decided to keep her in development until she turned 18. Swift made this decision because she wanted to release the songs immediately, to make sure that they still resonated with her teenage experiences.

Swift organized a showcase concert at Bluebird Cafe on November 3, 2004; among the attendees were Scott Borchetta, a music executive who was planning to establish an independent record label, Big Machine Records. She signed a recording contract with Big Machine two weeks after the concert, on the condition that her albums would be written by herself; her father purchased a three-percent stake in the company. The contract was finalized by July 2005, when Swift ended the working relationship with Dymtrow. She spent four months near the end of 2005 recording her debut album, Taylor Swift, with the producer Nathan Chapman.

Swift’s debut single, “Tim McGraw”, was released in June 2006. She and her mother spent mid-2006 sending promotional copies of the song to country radio stations across the US. Taylor Swift was released on October 24, 2006. On the US Billboard 200 chart, the album peaked at number five and spent 157 weeks—the longest chart run by an album in the 2000s.

With Taylor Swift, she became the first female country music artist to write or co-write every track on a platinum-certified debut album. The album was promoted by a six-month radio tour and Swift’s opening for other country artists, including Rascal Flatts in 2006, and George Strait, Brad Paisley, and Tim McGraw and Faith Hill in 2007. She opened for Rascal Flatts again in 2008, when she dated the singer Joe Jonas.

Taylor Swift was supported by four more singles in 2007 and 2008: “Teardrops on My Guitar”, “Our Song”, “Picture to Burn”, and “Should’ve Said No”. “Our Song” and “Should’ve Said No” reached number one on the Hot Country Songs chart; with the former single, Swift became the youngest person to single-handedly write and sing a number-one country

single. “Teardrops on My Guitar” was Swift’s breakthrough single on mainstream radio and charts, reaching the top 10 of the Pop Songs, Adult Pop Songs, and Adult Contemporary charts. Her next releases were the Christmas extended play (EP) The Taylor Swift Holiday Collection in October 2007, and the Walmart-exclusive EP Beautiful Eyes in July 2008. Swift became the youngest person to be awarded with Nashville Songwriters Association’s Songwriter/Artist of the Year in 2007.

2023–present: The Eras Tour, The Tortured Poets Department, and The Life of a Showgirl

In March 2023, Swift embarked on the Eras Tour, which she conceived as a tribute to her entire discography. The tour spanned five continents through December 2024. It exerted a global cultural, economic, and political impact and culminated in an unprecedented height of popularity for Swift, resulting in a phenomenon that the media dubbed “Swiftmania”. The Eras Tour became the first tour to gross $1 billion in revenue and the highest-grossing tour in history, with $2 billion in total revenue. Its concert film grossed $250 million to become the highest-grossing of its kind, and its photobook sold nearly a million copies in its first week in the US. The tour inspired Swift’s eleventh and twelfth

studio albums, The Tortured Poets Department (2024) and The Life of a Showgirl (2025). During the run of the Eras Tour, there were controversies surrounding Ticketmaster’s monopoly that led to political scrutiny in the US, venue mismanagement that led to a death in Brazil, and Singapore’s exclusivity deal that led to political tension in Southeast Asia.

In January 2024, AI-generated pornographic images portraying Swift were posted to Twitter and spread to other social media platforms, spurring criticism and demands for legal reform. In July 2024, three children were killed in a stabbing attack at a Swift-themed workshop in Southport, England, leading to civil unrest in the UK. The following month, the Vienna concerts were canceled following the arrest of suspects who planned a terrorist attack.

Endorsements and partnerships

Swift’s album rollouts normally consist of multimedia promotional activities that encompass corporate tie-ins and product endorsements. Target is a long-standing business partner with Swift, offering exclusive physical albums and merchandise. In 2008–2011, her albums and tours were promoted with self-designed dolls with Jakks Pacific, fragrances with Elizabeth Arden, clothes with L.E.I., and holiday cards with American Greetings. Her partnership deals included makeup products for CoverGirl and Cyber-shot cameras for Sony Electronics. In 2012–2015, she had tie-ins

with Starbucks, Keds, Subway, Diet Coke, Walgreens, Walmart, and Papa John’s. In 2014, New York City named Swift its official tourism ambassador. She had an exclusive streaming deal with Apple Music in 2015, signed a multi-year deal with AT&T in 2016, and partnered with United Parcel Service to distribute her albums in 2017. In 2019, she signed a multi-year deal with Capital One and launched a clothing line with Stella McCartney. She became the first global ambassador for Record Store Day in 2022.

Discography

Studio albums

Re-recorded albums

Taylor Swift (2006)
Fearless (2008)
Speak Now (2010)
Red (2012)
1989 (2014)
Reputation (2017)
Lover (2019)
Folklore (2020)
Evermore (2020)
Midnights (2022)
The Tortured Poets Department (2024)
The Life of a Showgirl (2025)

Fearless (Taylor’s Version) (2021)
Red (Taylor’s Version) (2021)
Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) (2023)
1989 (Taylor’s Version) (2023)

Filmography

Films

Documentaries

Valentine’s Day (2010)
The Lorax (2012)
The Giver (2014)
Cats (2019)
All Too Well: The Short Film (2021)
Amsterdam (2022)

Miss Americana (2020)
Taylor Swift: City of Lover (2020)
Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions (2020)
Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (2023)
Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party of a Showgirl (2025)

Tours

Fearless Tour (2009–2010)
Speak Now World Tour (2011–2012)
The Red Tour (2013–2014)
The 1989 World Tour (2015)
Reputation Stadium Tour (2018)
The Eras Tour (2023–2024)

Taylor Swift