From the Fearless highs and Sad Beautiful Tragic heartbreaks, @taylorswift13’s music has been the soundtrack to a journey of never giving up on love. And now, we’ll see you finally step out of the tortured poetry and into the golden daylight with your forever Lover!! 🫶🏻🫶🏻
20 years ago today, Taylor Swift made her first ever appearance on a Billboard chart.
She's now the #1 biggest artist of the 21st century on the Billboard charts.
Today marks #20YearsOfTaylorSwift.
Widely regarded as the biggest star on the planet, Taylor Swift has cultivated an era-defining career spanning 20 years, with her twelve record-shattering albums catapulting her into music history’s Big 5 (joining The Beatles, Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley, and Queen), claiming the honor of being the #1 best-selling female artist of all time (with 270 million album units) and solidifying her place as the de facto leader of the 21st century.
She is the #1 highest-grossing touring artist of all time, the #1 Billboard 200 artist of all time, the #1 most-streamed artist in Spotify history, the #2 most-streamed artist in Apple Music history, the #1 best-selling artist of the 21st century, the #1 most-awarded female artist of all time, the youngest woman to ever be inducted in the Songwriters Hall of Fame, the only musical act to ever be hailed TIME’s Person of the Year, the only artist to ever have eight 1M+ debuts on Billboard 200, and the record holder for the most Album of the Year wins in GRAMMYs’ seven-decade history (with a legendary four AOTY wins).
Among the near-unbreakable records that have cemented and immortalized her legacy, the biggest of them all are her cataclysmic, economy-shifting, earthshaking Eras Tour holding the title as the #1 highest-grossing tour of all time (with an unprecedented $2.077 billion total); her streaming behemoth “THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT” obliterating the record for the biggest album debut in Spotify history (with a whopping 314.5 million first-day streams); her being the only artist in history to ever *completely* sweep the entire Top 10, the entire Top 12, and the entire Top 14 of the Billboard Hot 100 chart; and her sales juggernaut “The Life of a Showgirl” holding the record for the biggest album debut in Billboard 200 history, amassing an astronomical 4.005 million album copies (U.S.) on its first week alone and practically breaking every single sales record in existence.
Her monumental 13th studio album is yet to come.
Taylor sold 70,000 digital downloads on 3 versions of I Knew It, I Knew You last week, on top of about 175k CDs of those versions that were available for about a total of 4 hours on her store.
Meanwhile, Olivia released an bonus track to iTunes yesterday, which isn't available on streaming, and 24 hours later it's already dropped to Number 3. Stupid Song is Number 14.
Everyone has the opportunity to sell singles. Not everyone has the ability. It's not cheating to be able to do it.
The problem with this fandom is they want their fave to INSTANTLY be Taylor’s coequal (and even has delusions of surpassing Taylor).
To be the “most successful woman in the industry”, you need to be *the* most successful artist OVERALL on the planet. To be able to match (or even surpass) Taylor, you would have to surpass:
- Billie, Sab, and Ariana (ALL her *current* peers, not just one, and not just in a specific metric)
- Bruno, Beyoncé, *and* The Weeknd
- Morgan, Harry, *and* BTS (the 500K debut territory on Billboard 200)
- Drake *and* Bad Bunny
- Adele
- 800K debut territory
- 1M debut territory (which Taylor has *long* surpassed)
- 2M debut territory
- 3M debut territory
- 4M debut territory
You would have to be the singularity, *the* biggest star alive, the industry-shaping, era-defining, needle-moving figure that Taylor is, just to be able to match her. And you would have to OUTDO that if you ever wish to become “the most”.
Instead, this fandom wants a shortcut and couldn’t even be bothered to go through all these ladder steps they’ve yet to climb and instead secretly wish that Taylor would just pass her crown and willingly hand over the keys to the kingdom, to let their fave absorb the astronomical chunk of the pie that Taylor has cultivated throughout her career, as if it were an inheritance that they can demand for their fave anytime they want.
Know your place and put in the work, ffs. The music industry is not a charity.
Writing this song felt like a musical departure and coming home at the same time. Creating something for Jessie was a new challenge and also felt like second nature all at once. And being a @toystory kid from the age of 5 til now… is an adventure I plan to be on, to infinity and beyond.
Thank you to the brilliant Andrew Stanton for imagining me for this, all those years ago when you wrote this newest film. Thank you to the incomparable @RandyNewman or the gorgeous sonic tapestry of songs and scores you’ve meticulously woven over the years. You created the Toy Story musical world, and we are lucky to get to live in it.
By we, I mean myself and my pal @jackantonoff. We wrote this with so much adoration for these characters that made us laugh and helped us learn lessons and think outside the backyard all throughout our childhoods. “I Knew It, I Knew You” from Toy Story 5 is out everywhere now. 🤠🐴
https://t.co/2JaaQvxHjp