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Taylor Alison Swift (born December 13, 1989) is an American singer-songwriter. 

Swift’s discography is a “critically hailed songbook”, as per Time’s Sam Lansky. She has won 14 Grammy Awards (including four for Album of the Year—the most won by an artist), an Emmy Award, 40 American Music Awards (the most won by an artist), 49 Billboard Music Awards (the most won by an artist), 118 Guinness World Records, 30 MTV Video Music Awards (including five Video of the Year wins—the most by an act), 12 Country Music Association Awards (including the Pinnacle Award).

As a songwriter, she has been honored by the Nashville Songwriters Association, the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and the National Music Publishers’ Association and was the youngest person on Rolling Stone’s list of the 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time in 2015. At the 64th BMI Awards in 2016, Swift was the first woman to be honored with an award named after its recipient. 

From available data, Swift has amassed over 50 million album sales and 150 million single sales as of 2019, and 114 million units globally, including 78 billion streams as of 2021. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry ranked her as the Global Recording Artist of the Year for a record four times (2014, 2019, 2022, and 2023). Swift has the most number-one albums in the UK and Ireland for a female artist this century, earned the highest income for an artist on Chinese digital music platforms (CN¥ 159,000,000 as of 2021), and is the first artist to occupy the entire top five of the Australian albums chart and the top ten of the country’s singles chart. 

Swift remains the world’s highest-grossing touring act ever, with cumulative ticket sales at $3.12 billion as of December 2024, per Pollstar. The Eras Tour is the highest-grossing tour of all time and the first to surpass $1 billion in revenue. Beginning with Fearless, each of her studio albums have opened with over one million global units. Swift is the most-streamed act on Spotify, and the most-streamed female artist on Apple Music. On Spotify, she is the only artist to have received more than 250 million and 350 million streams in one day (260 million on October 27, 2023, and 380 million on April 19, 2024) and was the first female act to reach 100 million monthly listeners. 

The most entries and the most simultaneous entries (175 and 34 songs), and most number-ones (5) for a soloist on the Billboard Global 200, are among her feats. Swift is the first and only artist to occupy the top nine spots on the Global 200. She has the most entries (154), top-ten songs (20), and number-ones (3) among solo acts on the Global 200 Excl. US. In the US, Swift has sold over 37.3 million albums as of 2019, when Billboard placed her eighth on its Greatest of All Time Artists Chart. Twelve of her songs have topped the Billboard Hot 100.

She is the longest-reigning and the first act to spend at least 100 weeks atop the Billboard Artist 100 (120 weeks); the soloist with the most cumulative weeks atop and in the top ten of the Billboard 200 (84 and 425); the woman with the most Billboard 200 number-ones (14), Hot 100 entries (total and single-week: 264 and 32), number-one debuts (7), top-ten songs (59), top-five songs (36), Streaming Songs chart-toppers (9), and weeks atop the Top Country Albums chart (101); and the act with the most number-one songs on Pop Airplay (13) and Digital Songs (29). Swift is the first woman to simultaneously chart five albums in the top 10 and eleven albums on the entire Billboard 200; and the first act to occupy the top four spots and chart seven albums in the top 10 on the Top Album Sales chart. 

She is the second highest-certified female digital singles artist (and fifth overall) in the US, with 137.5 million total units certified by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and the first woman to have both an album (Fearless) and a song (“Shake It Off”) certified Diamond. 

 

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