Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift is an American singer-songwriter and musician. Over the course of her career, her musical genres have shifted from country to pop to indie. Swift started writing music at twelve years old. She successfully broke into the mainstream country music scene at age seventeen with her first album Taylor Swift. She is one of the bestselling and highest awarded musical artists of all time. Swift's songs are typically about her relationships (both romantic and platonic) and various life experiences. In 2021, Swift's music accounted for approximately one out of every fifty album sales in the United States.

Swift was born Taylor Alison Swift on December 13, 1989, in West Reading, Pennsylvania. Her parents are Scott and Andrea Swift, a stockbroker and a homemaker, respectively. She has one sibling, a brother named Austin (now an actor). Swift originally wanted to be a financial adviser, similar to her father. She began singing at a young age, and by age ten, she was publicly performing at events like karaoke contests and county fairs. When she was twelve, Swift learned to play the guitar and started writing songs. Swift said she began writing music to deal with the isolation she felt from her peers. Her parents were incredibly supportive of her music; the family relocated to Hendersonville, Tennessee, when Swift was fourteen, so they could be closer to Nashville, where she would have a better chance of making it into the country music industry.

Swift's first and second years of high school were spent at Hendersonville High School. The following year, she attended Aaron Academy, a private Christian school with a homeschooling option. She graduated one year early and received her high school diploma in the mail.

In May 2022, Swift received an honorary doctorate degree from New York University in recognition of her achievements and contributions to the music industry.

Songwriting for me just started out as therapy." —Taylor Swift

When she was eleven, Swift began pursuing record deals in Nashville, using a demo CD of her karaoke covers. She soon realized she would have to write her own songs to achieve success, which is when she started to learn to play the guitar. After returning to Nashville at thirteen with her own music, Swift signed a development deal with RCA Records. This turn of events led to the family's move to Nashville. Swift began working with major songwriters after school to create music. Armed with a year's worth of music, she performed her new songs for RCA executives, who decided to shelve her work and "monitor her progress" until she turned eighteen––she was fourteen at the time. Unhappy with this, and feeling as if she were "running out of time [...] to capture these years of my life on an album while they still represented what I was going through," she chose to leave her deal with the label.

Swift signed a publishing contract with Sony/ATV Publishing when she was fourteen, making her the youngest artist to ever be signed to the company. Soon after, she met record executive Scott Borchetta, who was working for Universal Records. Within a few weeks, she received a call from him, in which he said he wanted to sign her but he was leaving Universal to start his own record label called Big Machine. She decided to sign with his new label. Her first album, the self-titled Taylor Swift, was released in October 2006. It stayed on the Billboard 200 chart for more than five years and peaked at number five on the list. In support of her album's release, Swift went on tour opening for the band Rascal Flatts.

Rapper Kanye West interrupting Swift's acceptance speech at the 2009 MTV VMAs.

Swift's second album, Fearless, was released in November 2008. It held the number one spot on the Billboard 200 chart for a total of eleven weeks (non-consecutively). The Fearless tour, which was her first headlining tour, began on April 23, 2009, and lasted until May 2010. The tour grossed over $63.7 million. The music video for "You Belong With Me," one of the singles off of Fearless, was nominated for––and won––the MTV Video Music Award for Best Female Video in 2009. While accepting the award during the September 2009 MTV VMAs, Swift was interrupted onstage by rapper Kanye West, who took the microphone from her to state, “Yo, Taylor, I’m really happy for you, Imma let you finish, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time!" The outburst was met with boos from the audience and is regarded as one of the most memorable moments from that year's VMAs. West was asked to leave shortly afterward. Beyoncé later won the award for Best Music Video of the Year; during her acceptance speech, she invited Swift back onstage to let her finish her speech.

Speak Now, Swift's third studio album, was released on October 25, 2010. Like Fearless, the album spent eleven non-consecutive weeks as number one on the Billboard 200. It was also the bestselling album of 2009 in the United States. By November 2010, the album had sold a record 278,000 digital download copies, making it the fastest-selling digital album in the US by a female artist at the time. For this, Swift received an entry in the Guinness World Records that year.

In November 2011, Swift released a song in collaboration with The Civil Wars for The Hunger Games movie called "Safe and Sound." She released "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together," the lead single off her next album Red, in August 2012; the album was released in October. It sold 1.21 million copies in the United States during its first week. The album tour began in March 2013. The release of Red marked the first of Swift's musical genre shifts, this time from country to pop. This continued with her fifth album 1989, released October 27, 2014, although it was the first album to be specifically advertised as such. 1989 was leaked online three days before its official release; Red had also leaked before its release. In its first week, 1989 sold nearly 1.3 million copies, making it the first album to go platinum that year in the US.

In November 2014, Swift removed her music from streaming service Spotify because she disagreed with the low royalties that Spotify pays its streaming artists. She later added her music back onto the platform in June 2017.

Swift had an additional feud with Apple Music in June 2015; she announced she would withhold her newest album, 1989, from the service because of Apple's refusal to pay artists for their music streamed during a user's three-month free trial. The day after Swift's announcement, Apple Music said it would pay artists for streams during free trials.

Swift received significant public attention and criticism in 2016 after another feud with Kanye West surfaced. Before releasing his song "Famous," West contacted Swift via phone call––later revealed to be secretly recorded––to discuss a lyric he had written about her that he prefaced as being "very controversial." The proposed line was "I feel like Taylor Swift might owe me sex," to which Swift responded, "That's not mean." The line in the released song, however, was "I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / Why? I made that bitch famous." Swift criticized the lyrics by calling the language "misogynistic" and said that West never mentioned the word "bitch" in the phone call. West's wife, Kim Kardashian, proceeded to leak selective snippets of the recorded call online to indicate Swift had approved of the lyrics. Swift responded by saying, "Where is the video of Kanye telling me he was going to call me "that bitch" in his song? It doesn’t exist because it never happened. You don’t get to control someone’s emotional response to being called "that bitch" in front of the entire world."

The album cover for Reputation. The artwork––and music––has a noticeably darker theme than her previous albums.

The ensuing controversy largely branded Swift as a liar in the media. In response, she dropped out of the public eye for nearly a year. In August 2017, Swift deleted most of her photos and posts from social media sites Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. On August 24, she announced her next album, Reputation, with a post on Instagram. Reputation was released on November 10, 2017. The album, and Swift's shift in persona, were made in an effort to regain control after the intense media scrutiny she had gone through since 2016. It sold over 1.2 million copies in its first week and made Swift the first artist to have four consecutive albums sell more than one million copies in their opening weeks.

In November 2018, Swift left Big Machine and signed with Universal Music Group with UMG’s Republic Records as her new record label. Her deal with Sony/ATV is believed to have ended in 2019. She later signed with Universal Music Publishing Group in February 2020. Lover, her first album with the new label, was released August 23, 2019. Unlike her previous four albums, Lover did not hit one million sales in the first week of its release; it reached only 867,000. Still, the album earned more money on its release day than any other album in the United States had within a combined first week of release in 2019. The Lover Fest tour, set to begin August 2020, was first postponed and eventually canceled by Swift in February 2021 due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

After leaving Big Machine Records, Swift attempted to purchase the masters of her first six albums from the label so she would own them entirely. Her proposed deal was turned down, though she was invited to rejoin Big Machine and produce one new record in exchange for each older one; Swift rejected this deal. Soon after, Scott Borchetta (owner of Big Machine) sold the company––including her masters––to Scooter Braun, with whom Swift had feuded before, due to his ties to Kanye West. This move was viewed as a deliberate snub to Swift, who said, "Any time Scott Borchetta has heard the words ‘Scooter Braun’ escape my lips, it was when I was either crying or trying not to. He knew what he was doing; they both did." In August 2019, Swift announced her intentions to re-record her first six albums, all owned by Big Machine, to reclaim ownership of her music.

In March 2020, the full phone call between Swift and Kanye West in 2016 was leaked, proving that she was never made aware of the highly disputed lyric from "Famous." Kim Kardashian responded by claiming the conflict "was always [about] whether there was a call or not and the tone of the conversation" and "never about the word bitch."

Folklore, Swift's eighth album, was released on July 24, 2020. The album was announced just sixteen hours before its midnight release. The album was written during Swift's period of isolation during the Covid-19 pandemic. Folklore signified the next major pivot in Swift's musical style from pop to indie folk, though this genre classification was questioned by some critics. The album was the first album in the US to reach platinum status that year; it reached more than 1.3 million sales on its first day and 2 million total in the first week. It also broke several streaming records.

On December 11, 2020, Swift's ninth album Evermore was released as a sister album to Folklore. Also, like Folklore, Swift announced the album less than a full day before its release; however, Evermore sales were measurably less successful and took one week to reach one million, unlike Folklore which reached those numbers on its first day. Still, Evermore is charted as the third-best female debut on Spotify.

So far, Swift has re-released two of her six unowned albums: Red and Fearless, under the new names Red (Taylor's Version) and Fearless (Taylor's Version). Both were released in 2021.

Because Swift's music is mostly known for being about her relationships, her romantic life has been widely reported in the media. She has dated a number of celebrities, mostly musicians and actors, including Jake Gyllenhaal, Harry Styles, Joe Jonas, Taylor Lautner, and Calvin Harris. As of 2022, she is dating Joe Alwyn; the two have been dating since 2017.

Swift's net worth is estimated at $400 million. She owns multiple properties, including a condo and a house (which she bought for her parents) in Nashville, plus houses in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, and Rhode Island. Her properties have a total value of approximately $81 million.

As of 2022, Swift has released nine studio albums, two re-recordings of her studio albums, and five extended plays.

• Taylor Swift (2006)
• Fearless (2008)
• Speak Now (2010)
• Red (2012)
• 1989 (2014)
• Reputation (2017)
• Lover (2019)
• Folklore (2020)
• Evermore (2020)

• The Taylor Swift Holiday Collection (2007)
• Beautiful Eyes (2008)

• Fearless (Taylor's Version) (2021)
• Red (Taylor's Version) (2021)