Attention Swifties! A groundbreaking announcement has been made as Time magazine has crowned Taylor Swift as its ‘Person of the Year’ for 2023. With a career spanning over a decade, Swift has been through all major ups and downs, but she continues to redefine her status as an unstoppable force in the music industry by breaking many boundaries and inspiring generations with her captivating music, which includes lyrics that explore brilliant tales of her extraordinary life.
Her remarkable ability to connect with millions around the globe, which was pretty evident in the last 12 months, has propelled her to this prestigious accolade.
Since the beginning of 2023, the pop star has been making waves by grabbing many headlines, be it for good or for the worse, which ticks one of the selection criteria for her to get this title. She has become the first woman to appear twice on a Person of the Year cover since the franchise began in 1927.
If you recall, Swift was also named Person of the Year in 2017, when she was recognized as one of the Silence Breakers who inspired women to speak out about sexual misconduct.
The “Shake It Off,” singer, 33, has also become a symbol of generational change as she is only the fourth solo Person of the Year born in the past half-century.
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Releasing Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) and 1989 (Taylor’s Version) this year alone in the United States marked Swift’s 12th and 13th albums, respectively, to top the Billboard 200 chart.
She also released music videos for “Karma,” “I Can See You,” and “Cruel Summer” as singles which accumulated millions of views. Moreover, her record-shattering The Eras Tour became the highest-grossing tour ever by a woman and second highest-grossing overall based on the first 56 North American shows alone. The accompanying concert film also became the highest-grossing concert film of all time, earning $249 million worldwide.
The concert still has many shows left to perform as it will resume next year on February 7, 2024, in Japan, at the Tokyo Dome venue, which will add more than a million to the total earnings. As the demand for tickets has been high, it crashed Ticketmaster’s website, prompting a hearing into its business practices by the US Senate earlier this year. This is not the only shocking thing that happened during the tour as, in Seattle, her concerts generated seismic activity equivalent to a 2.3 magnitude earthquake!
As Swift’s Eras Tour became a global sensation, she also achieved billionaire status in 2023 owing to her successful concert tours as well as ticket sales. Bloomberg reported she now has a net worth of $1.1 billion, based on an analysis of publicly disclosed figures of real estate, music catalog, streaming deals, and concert ticket sales, as well as merchandise. Among all of that, Swift was crowned as Apple Music’s and Spotify’s Global Artist of the Year.
“While her popularity has grown across the decades, this is the year that Swift, 33, achieved a kind of nuclear fusion: shooting art and commerce together to release an energy of historic force,” the magazine said as the award goes to an event or person deemed to have had the most influence on global events over the past year. Additionally, Time said in its profile, “No one else on the planet today can move so many people so well.”
“Achieving this feat is something we often chalk up to the alignments of planets and fates, but giving too much credit to the stars ignores her skill and her power.” The magazine also interviewed Swift, with the artist revealing that “this is the proudest and happiest I’ve ever felt, and the most creatively fulfilled and free I’ve ever been.” She adds, “Ultimately, we can convolute it all we want, or try to overcomplicate it, but there’s only one question.”
In the same interview, she concludes by saying, “Are you not entertained?”
Swift also expresses her gratitude to Time’s magazine and her crew for the photoshoot on Instagram, quoting, “The biggest, loudest, most aggressively over-excited thank you to @time for naming me Person of the Year. Thank you to @inezandvinoodh for the vision and fun they bring to every shoot I’ve ever done with them. Loved the whole creative team who had no right to serve as hard as they did: Styled by @heidibivens, Hair by @hollismithhead, Make-up by @diane.kendal, Nails by @makinaill, Produced by @vlm.productions.”
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Simply put, all her recent achievements this year alone are countless, and the pop icon will continue her reign by being recognized for her songwriting, musical versatility, artistic reinventions, and influence on the music industry; after all, she is a prominent cultural figure of the 21st century.