Taylor Swift
Biography
Taylor Alison Swift (born December 13, 1989) is an American singer-songwriter. She is known for narrative songs about her personal life, which have received widespread media coverage. At age 14, Swift became the youngest artist signed by the Sony/ATV Music publishing house and, at age 15, she signed her first record deal.
Her 2006 eponymous debut album was the longest-charting album of the 2000s in the US. Its third single, "Our Song", made her the youngest person to single-handedly write and perform a number-one song on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. Swift's second album, Fearless, was released in 2008. Buoyed by the pop crossover success of the singles "Love Story" and "You Belong with Me", it became the US's best-selling album of 2009 and was certified diamond in the US. The album won four Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year.
Swift was the sole writer of her 2010 album Speak Now, which won two Grammy Awards and was her first to debut with over a million copies sold in the first week in the US. Her fourth album, Red (2012), yielded her first Billboard Hot 100 number-one single, "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together".
For her fifth album and first all-pop project, 1989 (2014), she won three Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year, and became the first woman to replace herself at number one on the Hot 100, with the singles "Shake It Off" and "Blank Space". Her sixth album, Reputation (2017), made her the only act to have four consecutive albums each sell one million copies in their first week in the US, while yielding her fifth Hot 100 number-one song, with "Look What You Made Me Do". With her seventh album, Lover (2019), she became the first woman in US history to have six albums sell over 500,000 units in their first week.
Having sold more than 50 million albums—including 37 million in the US, Swift is one of the world's best-selling music artists and the highest-earning female musician of the 2010s. She has won 10 Grammy Awards, a Brit Award, an Emmy Award, six Guinness world records and is the most-awarded act at the American Music Awards with 29 wins, and most-awarded woman at the Billboard Music Awards with 23 wins.
As a songwriter, Swift has been honored by the Songwriters Hall of Fame and was included in Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time list in 2015. She appeared in Time's list of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2010, 2015 and 2019 and was ranked first in the Forbes Celebrity 100 in 2016 and 2019. She topped IFPI's list of best selling artists of the world in 2014 and 2019. In 2019, Swift placed at number eight on Billboard's list of greatest artists of all time—the highest for an act that debuted in the 21st century—and was named the Woman of the Decade by the magazine and the Artist of the Decade by the American Music Awards.