Taylor Swift she has already won several Grammys – including album of the year for “Fearless”, her second album, which was released in 2008 – and her concerts in Europe are “tearing”.

Looking back, one could say that few considered Taylor Swift a serious artist. Proof of this came at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, the night Kanye West stormed the stage to insist that the title of Best Female Video should go to Beyonce for “Single Ladies” and not to Swift for “You Belong With Me”. Some defended the rapper’s words, though not his choice of message. Much has changed since then.

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Like Shania Twain did in the mid-1990s, Swift decided to move away from her country roots and embrace mainstream pop. She made her first foray into the genre with her 2012 album ‘Red’, which featured powerful Swedish producer Max Martin – the mastermind behind hits like Britney Spears’ ‘…Baby One More Time’ and ‘I Kissed A Girl” by Katy Perry. She perfected her new image two years later with the album 1989. It won Album of the Year at the 2016 Grammys and remains her best-selling album, with more than 10 million copies sold.

Swift proved she’s here to stay. Her tenth studio album, ‘Midnights’, ‘broke’ many records. It became the most streamed record in Spotify history on its release date, with 184.6 million plays in just 24 hours! In the United States, over 1.5 million copies were sold within a week and his songs swept the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100′. Swift’s albums also accounted for one of the top 25 vinyls sold in the U.S. in 2022: “Midnights” topped the chart with 1.7 million copies, and “Folklore,” originally released in 2020, took seventh place with 174,000 copies. The streaming era may have ended the days of astronomical sales numbers, but its numbers are approaching those of pop artists at the end of the last century.

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Meanwhile, a recent Morning Consult poll revealed an interesting tidbit: 53% of American adults consider themselves fans of the singer, while 16% call themselves die-hard fans. “Swift’s fan base is made up largely of millennials and leans white and Democratic,” the poll states. Unsurprisingly, the release of tickets for her current tour caused Ticketmaster to collapse after receiving over 3.5 million bookings.

Since her tour began on March 17th, she has made headlines for her spectacular production and the 44 songs it includes, in just over three hours. Billboard predicts the tour will bring in $591 million, while Forbes estimates earnings at $620 million. Regardless of the exact number, it will be the highest-grossing solo artist tour in history: surpassing the nearly $408 million that Madonna’s “Sticky & Sweet Tour” brought in in 2008 and 2009. Bearing in mind that Forbes estimates that her fortune would be $570 million in 2022, Swift will end the year by joining the billionaire club.

Pop stars who reach this level tend to owe their fortunes to business deals. Rihanna, for example, reached a net worth of $1.7 billion in 2021 thanks to her Fenty Beauty makeup line and Savage X Fenty underwear brand. But Swift has built an empire on her songs alone, from record sales, streaming rights – she has 84 million monthly listeners on Spotify – and tickets that sell out in minutes.