TIME Taylor Swift

TAYLOR SWIFT’S 2023 ERAS TOUR HASN’T just been a pop culture phenomenon—it’s been a geological one, too. At Swift’s back-to-back sold-out shows in July 2023 at Lumen Field in Seattle, the crowd—an astonishing 72,000 fans each night—was so loud that it registered the equivalent of a 2.3-magnitude earthquake on the Richter scale. The reaction was quickly dubbed a “Swift Quake” after the “Beast Quake” that rocked Lumen in 2011 when the Seattle Seahawks scored a last-minute game-clinching playoff touchdown. Yet the zealous football fans were no match for Swifties, seismologist Jackie Caplan-Auerbach told CNN after the second show. “The shaking was twice as strong as Beast Quake,” she said. “It absolutely doubled it.” To use the language of seismology, there are foreshocks, there are mainshocks, and then there’s Taylor Swift,…

YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE A SWIFTIE TO have been touched in some way by Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, a stadium arena experience that kicked off in March 2023. The show, which pays homage to every era of the artist’s 17-year career, was set to become the biggest tour of all time just a third of the way through its run. If you live in one of the locales where Swift, 33, performed, your city likely saw a boost in revenue from the hundreds of thousands of concert attendees who traveled from near and far. If you don’t—or simply couldn’t snag tickets due to the cost or the now infamous Ticketmaster snafu—chances are you’ve seen clips of the three-and-a-half-hour show from celebrities’ and fans’ Instagram stories. While there’s much to…

FROM TIME’S NOVEMBER 24, 2014, COVER STORY AT 8 O’CLOCK ON THE MOST EXCITING night of her life, America’s most important musician was leading several dozen fans in a performance of “Happy Birthday” directed toward a young woman named Caylee, who had just turned 21. She presented Caylee with a bottle of champagne and a card. “Do you know what kind of drinker you are yet?” the 24-year-old superstar asked the 21-year-old as she put her arm around her. “Are you a happy drunk?” Earlier that day, in the same Manhattan event space, Taylor Swift had charmed music-biz executives while waiters circulated with frenched lamb and lobster canapés. Her fifth album had come out that morning. She greeted bosses from iHeart-Media–formerly Clear Channel, recently rechristened–and took pictures with them and…

Not everything could fit into the previous article, so here’s more of what Swift told TIME. Why did you leave Spotify? I’m in an office of people who are upset they can’t stream your music. Everybody’s complaining about how music sales are shrinking, but nobody’s changing the way they’re doing things. They keep running toward streaming, which is, for the most part, what has been shrinking the numbers of paid album sales. With Beats Music and Rhapsody you have to pay for a premium package in order to access my albums. And that places a perception of value on what I’ve created. On Spotify, they don’t have any settings, or any kind of qualifications for who gets what music. I think that people should feel that there is a value…

MAKE NO MISTAKE ABOUT IT—TAYLOR Swift always has plenty of feelings about what you think of her and the headlines she’s made in recent years, something she reiterated relentlessly in the first single, “Look What You Made Me Do,” off her 2017 album Reputation. If the track and album title (and all those creepy snake GIFs) weren’t obvious enough clues, the video for the song drove home that fact that Swift feels keenly about being critiqued as a public figure. The video, which debuted at the 2017 MTV Video Music Awards—the setting for many a dramatic narrative in Swift’s life—showed the pop princess’s character viciously confronting her own past personas as well as the dramas that have surrounded her, from her highly scrutinized romantic relationships to her years-long feud with…

IT WAS AUGUST 23, 2019, AND AT LONG LAST, Lover had arrived. Taylor Swift’s seventh studio album, clocking in at a meaty 18 tracks—her longest ever—was finally available to the star’s legion of fans. And did Lover deliver. Described by Swift as “a celebration of love, in all its complexity, coziness, and chaos,” Lover not only gave Swifties a boatload of up-tempo electropop songs, it served up a tantalizing labyrinth of Easter eggs, celebrity name-checks, and meta references only die-hard fans would understand. Fans wasted no time diving in and then took to social media to speculate about the allusions (perceived or real) from Swift’s history. TIME got in on the fun, too, digging into Lover track by delicious track. Here’s where we landed. 1. “I Forgot That You Existed” Swift…