Taylor Swift

One of today’s biggest pop stars, Swift has worked her way from performing at local venues in Tennessee to commanding stadiums full of Swifties—her adoring fans—on international tours.

She spent her early career as a country musician, and her first single, “Tim McGraw,” became a Top 10 hit on Billboard’s country charts, quickly launching Swift into the spotlight. It wasn’t long before Swift began receiving critical praise for her work. The teenager won the Horizon Award from the Country Music Association (CMA) and the Academy of Country Music (ACM) Award for Top New Female Vocalist in 2007. The following year, she was nominated for Best New Artist at the Grammys. She became the youngest artist to win the Grammy for Album of the Year for Fearless in 2010.

The country music darling eventually began experimenting with genre. With her fifth album, 1989, she decisively reintroduced herself as a pop musician. Her new sound excited fans, and the 2014 release is one of her most successful to date, spending 11 weeks atop the Billboard 200 and selling more than 1.2 million copies in its first week.

Swift’s successes also include: a record-setting concert film called Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, multiple No. 1 songs on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming Spotify’s and Apple Music’s most streamed artist of the year, and achieving billionaire status. All that culminated in Time naming her its Person of the Year in 2023. Early in 2024, Swift became the first artist to win the Grammy for Album of the Year four times, further cementing her place in the history books.