In all but name, Taylor Swift has reached deity status. It surely won't be long before her face is printed on currencies around the world, and places of worship are opened in towns and capital cities (which also sell merch, of course).
Taylor Swift, 33, has been named TIME magazine's Person of the Year. Last week, she was named Spotify's Global Artist of the Year. Her rerecorded album 1989 – first released in 2014 – is the biggest debut of 2023. In Seattle, her concerts generated seismic activity equivalent to a 2.3 magnitude earthquake. She is set to surpass $1billion in ticket sales alone, and her tour is the highest grossing concert film of all time.
The list goes on; everything Taylor touches turns to gold.
Quite seriously, her power and influence have never been greater. Fans who haven't yet seen her in concert on her worldwide Eras Tour, or queued to watch the concert in cinema since it was released this autumn, will soon be able to rent The Eras Tour Concert Film at home and become surely the last people on earth to see it.
Taylor Swift is no longer just a recording artist, she's an empire. According to a Morning Consult survey in the US, 53% of American adults are fans. If her Instagram followers were a country, they'd make up the fifth biggest country in the world. There have been news articles published with the title, 'How Taylor Swift could sway the 2024 election'.
We know by now that the Taylor Swift machine is fairly invincible, but it's also emboldened by her girl squad – featuring, but not reduced to, Beyoncé, Selena Gomez, Camila Cabello, Blake Lively, the Haim sisters, Gigi Hadid and friend of her ex-boyfriend, Sophie Turner. You heard us before: influence.
A woman in her early thirties with such elemental power understandably – and knowingly – incites a great deal of public interest. Despite years of torment from the media around her personal life, appearance and dating history since she first entered the scene in 2006 – which is well-documented in her 2020 Netflix film Miss Americana – Taylor has managed to turn publicity into another string in her bow.
It wouldn't be Taylor without some romantic detours this year. After splitting up with her long-term boyfriend Joe Alwyn in April, the singer has been publicly linked to a number of people (most controversially, 1975 frontman Matty Healy), but her recent relationship with Kansas City Chiefs footballer Travis Kelce has taken the world by storm. Since their romance first blossomed in September, you'd be hard pushed to find a single media outlet that hasn't reported their latest dinner date, and when she changed the lyrics to her single Karma to include a reference to her new man last month, you could probably hear her fans' screams from space.
If you type 'Taylor Swift impact on' into Google, the search suggestions are: the economy, NFL, the world, the music industry and Travis Kelce. The answer to all of those queries, it seems, is: gargantuan. She’s almost transcended the art of celebrity entirely, eclipsing most of her peers and competitors one re-recorded smash hit at a time.
Her latest TIME magazine feat, which saw her beat Chinese President Xi Jinping, 'Hollywood strikers', OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, King Charles III, Russian President Vladimir Putin (yes, really), Chairman of the Federal Reserve Jerome Powell and 'Barbie', only scratches the surface. It's unlikely those nominees will feature in any of her next music videos either.
Taylor Swift has been consistently famous for almost 20 years and she just keeps getting bigger - but after the year she's just had, we may not have seen anything yet.
Nikki Peach is a news and entertainment writer at Grazia UK. She covers news and features across celebrity, culture and entertainment. Nikki also works as a freelance news reporter for the i.