Taylor Swift has reached another major streaming milestone, with her 2014 album 1989 officially exceeding 10 billion streams on Spotify.
According to InMusic, the achievement makes Swift the first artist in Spotify history to have five separate albums cross the 10-billion-stream mark.
With 1989 joining Lover, Midnights, folklore and reputation in the elite streaming category, Swift continues to extend her lead as one of the platform’s most consistently streamed artists across multiple eras. InMusic reports that Lover currently leads her catalogue with nearly 14 billion streams, followed by Midnights and folklore, both above 11 billion.
No other artist has matched the same level of sustained album performance. While The Weeknd has three albums surpassing 10 billion streams, Billie Eilish and Dua Lipa are the only other female artists with more than one project reaching the milestone.
Originally released in October 2014, 1989 marked a defining moment in Swift’s career, representing a full transition from country music into mainstream pop. Named after her birth year, the album featured production from Max Martin, Shellback, Jack Antonoff, Ryan Tedder, Imogen Heap and Nathan Chapman, drawing inspiration from 1980s pop sounds.
The album produced multiple Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 singles, including “Shake It Off,” “Blank Space,” “Bad Blood” and remained atop the Billboard 200 for 11 weeks. It also became the best-selling album in the United States that year and later won Album of the Year at the 2016 Grammy Awards, cementing its long-term cultural and commercial impact.
Swift signed with Big Machine Records in 2005 and debuted as a country singer with the albums Taylor Swift and Fearless. The singles “Teardrops on My Guitar”, “Love Story” and “You Belong with Me” found crossover success on country and pop radio formats. Speak Now expanded her country pop sound with rock influences, while Red explored electronic influences.
Swift recalibrated her artistic identity from country to pop with the synth-pop album 1989; ensuing media scrutiny inspired the hip-hop imbued Reputation. Through the 2010s, she accumulated the US Billboard Hot 100 number-one singles “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”, “Shake It Off”, “Blank Space”, “Bad Blood” and “Look What You Made Me Do”.
Shifting to Republic Records in 2018, Swift released the eclectic pop album Lover and re-recorded four of her first six albums due to a dispute with Big Machine. She explored indie folk on the 2020 albums Folklore and Evermore, synth-pop on Midnights and The Tortured Poets Department and soft rock on The Life of a Showgirl. The singles “Cardigan”, “Willow”, “All Too Well”, “Anti-Hero”, “Cruel Summer”, “Is It over Now?”, “Fortnight” and “The Fate of Ophelia” topped the Hot 100. Her Eras Tour and its associated film, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, are the highest-grossing concert tour and concert film of all time.
Swift is the only artist to have been named the IFPI Global Recording Artist of the Year five times. A record eight of her albums have each sold over a million copies first-week in the US. Publications such as Rolling Stone and Billboard have ranked Swift among the greatest artists of all time. She is the first individual from the arts to be named Time Person of the Year.
Her accolades include 14 Grammy Awards, including a record four Album of the Year wins and a Primetime Emmy Award. Swift is the most-awarded artist of the American Music Awards, the Billboard Music Awards and the MTV Video Music Awards. A subject of extensive media coverage, she has a global fanbase whose members are known as Swifties. At the age of 11, Swift travelled to Nashville with her mother to visit record labels and submit demo tapes of Dolly Parton and Dixie Chicks karaoke covers. She was rejected by all the labels, which led her to focus on songwriting. She started learning the guitar at the age of 12 with the help of a computer repairman and a local musician who assisted Swift with writing an original song.
In 2003, she and her parents started working with the talent manager Dan Dymtrow. With his help, Swift modelled for Abercrombie & Fitch, had an original song included on a Maybelline compilation CD and was given an artist development deal from RCA Records at 13. To help Swift break into the country music scene, her father transferred to Merrill Lynch’s Nashville office when she was 14 years old and the family relocated to Hendersonville, Tennessee. Swift attended Hendersonville High School for two years before transferring to Aaron Academy, which offered homeschooling.