Taylor Swift

Taylor Alison Swift was born in West Reading, Pennsylvania, on 13 December 1989 to Scott and Andrea Swift. Her work has moved across country, pop, folk and alternative. The Recording Academy describes her as the most decorated album of the year artist in Grammy history, and the Songwriters Hall of Fame credits her with 12 studio albums.

At 13 Swift's family sold their Pennsylvania farm and moved to Hendersonville, Tennessee, so she could pursue country music in Nashville. She signed a publishing deal with Sony/ATV in 2004 at age 14 and became the youngest signing in the company's history. Record executive Scott Borchetta signed her to his fledgling Big Machine label after seeing her perform in Nashville.

Swift signed with Big Machine Records in 2006 and scored her first Top 40 hit with the single "Tim McGraw". Her self-titled debut album followed when she was 16 and she toured as an opening act for Rascal Flatts.

Her self-titled debut album arrived in October 2006 and first appeared on the Billboard 200 chart in November that year. 'Tim McGraw' became her first song to reach the Billboard Hot 100 when it debuted in September 2006 during its initial chart run. Taylor Swift was certified platinum in 2007 after selling more than one million copies in the United States.

Swift wrote or co-wrote every song on her debut album, a creative autonomy that defined her career. She was nominated for the best new artist Grammy in 2007 but lost to Amy Winehouse.

On her second album Fearless, released in November 2008, Swift courted a mainstream pop audience without abandoning her country roots. The album sold more than half a million copies in its first week and opened at number one on the Billboard 200 chart, while the single "Love Story" accounted for more than four million paid downloads. It later became the best-selling album in the United States for 2009.

Her CMA entertainer of the year award made her the youngest winner of that honor and the first female solo artist since 1999 to take it. At the 2010 Grammy Awards she collected four honors, including best country album and album of the year, and with that win she became the youngest artist ever to take the album of the year category. She attended her first Grammys at 18 and skipped her senior prom to be there, and at the 2009 ceremony she performed "Fifteen" as a duet with Miley Cyrus.

Red sold 1.2 million copies in its first week in the United States, the highest one-week total in a decade, and 'We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together' gave Swift her first number-one hit on the Billboard pop singles chart.

She called 1989 her first official pop album. Swift became the only act to earn three million-selling weeks with an album, and 1989 went on to sell more than five million copies in the United States.

At the 58th Grammy Awards in February 2016, 1989 won album of the year and best pop vocal album, making her the first woman to win album of the year twice.

Reputation, released in November 2017, ended the year as the top-selling American LP in the country, and the reputation Stadium Tour became the highest-grossing tour in US history at the time. In 2018 Swift left Big Machine and signed with Republic Records and Universal Music Group.

In June 2019 Scooter Braun's Ithaca Holdings acquired Big Machine Records, including the masters of Swift's first six albums, in a deal reported at $300 million. Swift later sought to gain control of her masters and proposed making that ownership part of a new deal with the label, and she began re-recording her early material to gain control of it.

Fearless (Taylor's Version) and Red (Taylor's Version) appeared in 2021. Speak Now (Taylor's Version) arrived in July 2023 and 1989 (Taylor's Version) followed that October.

Swift announced and released folklore as a surprise on 23 July 2020, a 16-track album written and recorded in isolation during the Covid-19 lockdown. She worked remotely with Aaron Dessner of the National, Bon Iver and Jack Antonoff on the album, and she wrote and directed a video for the song "Cardigan", released alongside it.

Folklore topped the charts in the United States and Britain and earned six Grammy nominations, including album of the year. It won album of the year at the 63rd Grammy Awards, her third win in the category and 11th career Grammy, making her the first female artist in history to win album of the year three times; she accepted the award onstage beside Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner.

Evermore, described as a sister album to folklore, arrived at midnight on Friday 11 December of that year; it is Swift's ninth album and contains 17 tracks.

The Eras Tour opened on 17 March 2023 as her first tour since the pandemic and drew on songs from 11 albums, running for 21 months before it closed in Vancouver on 8 December 2024. Guinness World Records lists it as grossing $2,077,618,725 from 149 shows across 51 stadiums in 19 countries, with 10,168,008 tickets sold at an average price of $204.33 and an average of 68,242 people per show.

The official tally for the 21-month run represents face-value ticket sales only, without the dynamic pricing model used by some other acts, and the run made the Eras Tour pop history's first $2 billion tour. Her eight nights at Wembley Stadium accounted for 753,112 tickets sold.

Swift and her team self-financed the $15 million concert film, which grossed $261.1 million worldwide and became the top-grossing concert documentary of all time, not adjusted for inflation. It opened across the United States, Canada and Mexico from Friday 13 October, with adult tickets at $19.89 plus tax and children's and senior tickets at $13.13 each. The official Eras Tour book sold nearly one million copies in its first week at Target.

Midnights became the fastest album to reach one billion streams on Spotify. During the 2024 Grammy ceremony Swift announced that The Tortured Poets Department would arrive on 19 April. At the 2025 Grammys that album received six nominations, including album of the year. Her 2025 album The Life of a Showgirl, a 12-track record, became her 15th number-one album on the Billboard 200 chart and set an all-time record for the largest weekly sum, with 4.002 million album equivalent units and 3,479,500 in pure album sales.

Swift has won 14 Grammy Awards from 58 nominations, including four for album of the year, taken for Fearless, 1989, folklore and Midnights ^{2Taylor Swift · Recording Academy (GRAMMY.com) ↗}. At the 2024 Grammys she became the first artist in history to win album of the year four times, moving her ahead of Stevie Wonder, Frank Sinatra and Paul Simon as the sole record-holder with four album of the year awards ^{5A Timeline Of Taylor Swift's GRAMMYs History, From Skipping Senior Prom To Setting A Record With 'Midnights' · Recording Academy (GRAMMY.com) ↗17Taylor Swift Wins Historic Fourth Album of the Year Grammy for 'Midnights' · Billboard ↗}.

Her Midnights win was her 13th Grammy, and 13 is her lucky number ^{5A Timeline Of Taylor Swift's GRAMMYs History, From Skipping Senior Prom To Setting A Record With 'Midnights' · Recording Academy (GRAMMY.com) ↗}. 'All Too Well: The Short Film' won best music video in 2023 and made her the first artist to win the category with a sole directing credit; 'Mean' won her two more Grammys at the 2012 ceremony, and 'Safe & Sound' from The Hunger Games won best song written for visual media in 2013 ^{5A Timeline Of Taylor Swift's GRAMMYs History, From Skipping Senior Prom To Setting A Record With 'Midnights' · Recording Academy (GRAMMY.com) ↗}.

She was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame at the organization's 2026 dinner, where Steven Spielberg spoke in her honor. Time named her Person of the Year in 2023.