How Big Is Taylor Swift? (2024)

You might have heard: Taylor Swift cannot be stopped.

Her new album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” sold 2.6 million copies in its opening week last month, earning Swift her eighth Billboard No. 1 album since 2020.

At the Grammy Awards in February, she became the first artist to win album of the year for a fourth time, breaking a tie with Frank Sinatra, Stevie Wonder and Paul Simon.

And earlier this month, Swift’s Eras Tour, the 152-date, billion-dollar stadium takeover that began last year, resumed abroad before it returns to the U.S. in October.

Taylor Swift onstage at an Eras Tour show in New Jersey last year.

In 2023, according to the data tracking service Luminate, one in every 78 songs streamed in the U.S. was by Swift.

With a mix of prolific artistic output and relentless business savvy, plus cultural dominance as a celebrity, Swift, 34, has created such a swell of momentum that she is probably more popular — more omnipresent — 19 years into her professional music career than she ever has been.

That is not normal.

Swift fans in the parking lot of MetLife Stadium in New Jersey.

But just how big is Taylor Swift, in terms of the all-time pop pantheon?

The singer’s ongoing surge has inspired inevitable debates about how her success stacks up not only against her pop peers, like Beyoncé and Drake, but to the greats that came before them. Even Billy Joel said he could only compare this Swift moment to Beatlemania.

Enraptured Beatles fans in 1964.

It may be impossible to do an exact, one-to-one comparison between Swift’s career and that of the Beatles — or Madonna, Michael Jackson, Britney Spears, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John or your icon of choice. Besides music being personal and subjective, the nature of success (and how it is calculated) has changed drastically over time. Much of a star’s grip on the zeitgeist is also intangible — a vibe in the air, their influence moving subtly but undeniably through culture.

But the absence of a truly scientific comparison has never stopped the amusem*nt that comes from the eternal sports and pop culture debates of our time: Jordan vs. LeBron (or Kareem, or Kobe). Brady vs. Montana (or Marino, or Mahomes). “Star Wars” vs. “Star Trek” (or Harry Potter, or the Marvel Universe).

Even without definitive conclusions, it’s impossible for certain loyalists, haters and obsessives not to wonder how giants match up using whatever evidence might be available.

So with Swift’s career still peaking late into its second decade, we ran the numbers and analyzed the data, taking stock of what she has accomplished so far — and when — alongside some of the heaviest hitters in each category.

Taylor vs. the Beatles
Hit Singles

First, there are the Beatles, who for most music fans still represent the gold standard of pop mania in modern times.

From the early 1960s, when pop music usually came in the form of two-sided vinyl singles, until the Fab Four broke up in 1970, the band released 64 songs that landed on Billboard’s all-genre chart, known as the Hot 100.

In that time, the Beatles helped to usher in the rock ’n’ roll revolution — and the album age — by releasing more than a dozen LPs.

But many of the records they set for hit singles still stand today.

By that point in their musical lives, the individual Beatles were well into their various solo endeavors, with McCartney experimenting with new wave and George Harrison writing songs about race cars.

But as with any comparison across eras, there must be footnotes and asterisks. When we look at Top 10s from the 1960s, we’re only counting an artist’s actual “singles” — songs released for purchase outside of a full album.

After 1998, the rules began changing to include any song on the radio, regardless of how it was released, and eventually counting digital downloads and streams. By today’s rules, the Beatles would have even more hits than Billboard’s official count.

Swift, whose new album features 31 songs, each of which hit the Hot 100, has dominated with these new metrics: In 2022, she became the first artist to occupy the entire Top 10 on the Hot 100 at once following the release of “Midnights.”

She repeated and expanded upon that feat last month with songs from “The Tortured Poets Department,” which filled the top 14 spots on the singles chart.

This might measure a different kind of fervor than the musical ubiquity of the Beatles or others who ruled the radio later — a depth of obsession for Swift’s fans who stream her music billions of times and purchase it in multiple formats.

The length of Swift’s career has allowed her into the Beatles’ vaunted ballpark by giving her the chance to evolve her sound, grow her loyal audience and take full advantage of technological advances.

Yet as wild as it is for the Beatles to have accomplished so much in so little time, Swift’s longevity might be considered equally impressive in pop music, which often overvalues the new and — especially among female artists — the young.

Taylor vs. Michael Jackson
Album Sales

Despite Swift’s streaming success — and ability to move even vinyl records — the high bar can only be Michael Jackson when it comes to album sales.

Like the Beatles, Jackson reached heights pop had never seen, changing the very nature of stardom, for better and worse, by kicking off the MTV video age and ruling popular culture amid tabloid mayhem.

Unlike the Beatles’, Jackson’s career was relatively long, from his time as a child star in the Jackson 5 until his death in 2009 at 50.

Part of Swift’s genius as she’s run up the stats these last few years — releasing nearly 200 songs since the pandemic — is that the music that first made her a star in the mid-to-late 2000s is exploding again alongside her latest hits, giving new fans a fresh entry point.

Already, Swift has released more solo albums than Jackson ever did, and with her productivity — including those two different versions of four of her albums so far — she can approach the King of Pop.

In all, Jackson’s 10 solo albums have been certified 72 times platinum. Swift’s 11 original albums have been certified 50 times platinum. But her album sales tell us that number, including Taylor’s Versions, is likely to be closer to 90. And she is very much still going, with “The Tortured Poets Department” already topping three million in about a month.

Taylor vs. Britney Spears
A Pop-Star Arc

Swift’s extended peak becomes even more of a standout when compared to a more typical pop trajectory — even one with towering highs.

Like Swift, Britney Spears released her debut single at age 16 and came to absolutely dominate the cultural conversation (sometimes in ways that discounted her music in favor of her love life).

Commercially huge in its moment, Spears’s music career was also relatively short-lived, which tends to be the case more often than not, especially for singers who are known as performers and celebrities more than quote-unquote serious artists.

Swift, unlike Spears, has been firm in branding herself as a songwriter from the beginning, helping stave off some sexist criticism of her music as frivolous.

The diminishing returns of Spears’s subsequent releases represent a sadly common path for the kind of pop singers that audiences can treat as disposable, with a new model always on the horizon.

Taylor vs. Madonna
Era After Era

Madonna’s ability to reinvent — to persist as a woman in pop — is the reason we talk about artist “eras” to begin with. Another path-breaking solo pop singer with a huge peak, a long run of domination, a savvy command of marketing and unexpected longevity, Madonna has had a career that is 43 years long and counting.

From her breakthrough second album, “Like a Virgin,” released in 1984, when she was 26, through “Bedtime Stories” in 1994, Madonna was inescapable, pushing the boundaries of visual and sonic reinvention that are now considered prerequisites for top acts.

Taylor vs. the Veterans
Touring and Awards

Alongside a pop survivor like Madonna, now 65, acts like Elton John, 77, and Bruce Springsteen, 74, are an interesting comparison point for Swift because of their productivity, longevity and critical acclaim — all of which has paid off on the road.

(See also: Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones, who are not included here, but would be interesting points of comparison using slightly different metrics.)

While Madonna has slipped on the charts — none of her most recent four albums has gone platinum — she remains a major live draw, a standard give-and-take for a top-tier legacy act.

John and Springsteen, both veterans about 50 years into their careers, also had periods of commercial dominance beginning in the 1970s with albums like “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” (released when John was 26, that pop-star sweet spot) and “Born to Run” (from when Springsteen was 25).

But as they settled into pop-star middle age, plateauing commercially, they too have persisted with uber-successful, long-running tours fueled by fan allegiance and critical acclaim.

One notable aspect of Swift’s career so far is that it seems to bridge the gap between two kinds of artists, both of which can become legacy acts with strong enough catalogs and fan bases: the sustained, hit-making entertainers who may be overlooked, at least at first, as musicians, and the serious singer-songwriters who tend to be more critically lauded.

The Grammy Awards, love them or hate them, are voted on by other musicians and provide a proxy stat for prestige and overall acclaim in the moment.

The band took the top prize just once — for “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” the first rock album to win, in 1968 — in part because the Grammys, until the late 1960s, were quite conservative, often recognizing old-school, traditional pop acts like Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand. (“Help!” and “Revolver” both lost to Sinatra.)

Looking at stats like that, you could argue that the most popular musicians are taken more seriously as artists now than ever before, in no small part because of acts like the Beatles, Jackson and Madonna.

Taylor vs. Beyoncé and Drake
Modern Heavyweights

While Swift’s overall pound-for-pound standing in each of the categories we’ve looked at puts her in rare historical company, it is notable that two of her most immediate contemporaries — Beyoncé, 42, and Drake, 37 — are also legitimate challengers across the board.

All three artists have maneuvered the industry transition between CDs, downloads and streaming to become defining modern superstars while also maximizing those intangibles like cultural reach and celebrity domination.

Beyoncé, now 23 years into a solo career after her time with the group Destiny’s Child, stands with Swift when it comes to versatility and longevity, plus sustained commercial dominance.

Like Madonna and Swift, Beyoncé has continued to stretch the limits of what a woman’s pop career can hold, landing two chart-topping singles in her 40s (with “Break My Soul,” in 2022, and again earlier this year, with the country-influenced “Texas Hold ’Em”).

She has also performed twice at the Super Bowl — something Swift has yet to do — a stage where acts like Madonna, Jackson and Springsteen have solidified their unquantifiable grasp on culture.

And then there is Drake, a relentless hitmaker. Like Swift, Drake has optimized his output to take advantage of the way streaming has reshaped the industry and its accolades to set new records, including 328 total entries on the Hot 100.

Swift, with 232, is the only other artist with at least 200.

Yet somehow Drake and Swift have never released a song together, despite sharing a certain canniness and expressing mutual appreciation for one another.

Even in his recent battle with Kendrick Lamar, Drake made clear that he sees Swift as his only real contemporary competition. (He has also rapped about having “more slaps than the Beatles” and frequently invokes Jackson’s success as a touchstone.)

Drake, Beyoncé and Swift all have this modern characteristic in common: They’re each actively playing for legacy, one eye on history and another on the record books. Ambitious and autonomous, they’re proudly writing their résumés in real time, juicing Billboard numbers and even gunning for accolades.

As a shrewd student of music and fame, Swift may know that she will never achieve the exact kind of domination that the Beatles, Jackson and Madonna had at the height of global monoculture, when everyone might pay attention to the same thing. But she’s certainly trying, taking bits and pieces from each’s career and making sure to maximize her work and reach in all the ways that weren’t available then.

She cares how she’s perceived and how she’ll be remembered when the noise fades and all that’s left are the songs — and the stats.

So far, it’s working.