No Allergy Popstar… How Taylor Swift became a global icon

Thanks to a keen sense of timing and artistic transformation, the 34-year-old American singer has established herself as one of the biggest musical stars of the last twenty years. From country to pop, from indie folk to slick business, its growing popularity owes nothing to chance.

It’s a snowball that never stops growing. Taylor Swift ended 2023 as the biggest music star in the world, named Person Of The Year by Time magazine, and the most streamed artist of the year on Spotify streaming platforms. and Apple Music, having broken the historic record for the number of number one albums sold by a singer... The native of Reading, Pennsylvania, becomes at 34 the juggernaut she always wanted to be, after twenty years of career and of gradual ascension.

A revenge for the one who had difficulty overcoming her image as a purely American superstar and who found many pitfalls on her path. Thanks to a formidable sense of timing and, all the same, a talent for writing songs, here she is attacking the year 2024 with a new costume built to last.

Massive and sincere support from the public

Such success cannot be built from scratch. To remain so high for so long, massive and sincere support from the public is necessary, because promotion, radio hype and presence on social networks can hardly compensate for artistic failure.

Its first asset is therefore its songs. Then, it's her ability to change gear quickly, to be able to identify what aesthetic is requested by the public, as when she abandoned her early country with the album Red, released in 2012, to embrace less divisive pop. . In doing so, she gradually put aside her image as the darling of conservative white America to expand her territory, confirming this shift with the following album, 1989, released in 2014.

For years, she navigated between the need to satisfy her less progressive base, while making herself a generational icon, in fact walling herself in a political silence which served her commercially. After being reluctant to condemn Donald Trump in 2016, she decided to call for Democratic votes in 2018 in the midterm elections. There, his audience exploded.

Control everything

Taylor Swift is a singer, of course, but also a businesswoman. She knows how to capture the times, she understood that the overflow of danceable electronic music from the early 2010s frustrated a public lacking more pop artists capable of making them dance.

In 2020, during successive confinements, she released two albums almost in quick succession, Folklore and Evermore, more anchored in indie pop and folk sounds, softer, more in line with the global need to dress up the long days spent at home.

Sweep away the humiliations

In 2023, Taylor Swift has struck a very big blow. She, who had lost part of the rights to two of her old albums, simply re-recorded them identically, legally re-appropriating their content and at the same time putting the spotlight back on her back catalog. An extremely clever and lucrative strategy which has considerably increased its listening scores.