Taylor Swift named Time magazine’s Person of the Year
Pop star Taylor Swift was named Time magazine’s 2023 “Person of the Year,” beating out Barbie and King Charles III and ending her year with another accolade
“While her popularity has grown across the decades, this is the year that Swift, 33, achieved a kind of nuclear fusion: shooting art and commerce together to release an energy of historic force,” the magazine said.
“No one else on the planet today can move so many people so well,” Time said in its profile. “Achieving this feat is something we often chalk up to the alignments of planets and fates, but giving too much credit to the stars ignores her skill and her power.”
Time said Swift was selected because she found a way to give people around the world hope in some seriously dark times.
“Taylor Swift found a way to transcend borders and be a source of light… Swift is the rare person who is both the writer and hero of her own story,” Time editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs wrote in a statement.
“Much of what Swift accomplished in 2023 exists beyond measurement. She mapped her journey and shared the results with the world: She committed to validating the dreams, feelings, and experiences of people, especially women, who felt overlooked and regularly underestimated.”
The magazine also interviewed Swift, with the artist revealing that “this is the proudest and happiest I’ve ever felt, and the most creatively fulfilled and free I’ve ever been.”
She even talked about her relationship with Kansas City Chiefs star Travis Kelce for the first time publicly. The pair started hanging out after Kelce wore a friendship bracelet on his podcast, which Swift said was “metal as hell” and started to hang out after.
“I’m just there to support Travis,” she said about her appearances at NFL games that have given some of them a ratings boost. “I have no awareness of if I’m being shown too much and pissing off a few dads, Brads, and Chads.”
Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) is TIME’s 2023 Person of the Year https://t.co/oyjR55azCZ pic.twitter.com/m2qbIbd5TX
— TIME (@TIME) December 6, 2023
Part of Swift’s stunning year was her “Eras Tour,” which grossed about $2.2 billion in North American ticket sales alone. Swift has dominated not only Super Bowl-sized arenas, but local movie theaters as well.
In its opening weekend, the pop singer’s concert film, “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” raked in about $96 million in the box office in the United States and Canada, making it the highest-grossing concert film domestically for an opening weekend.
Swift broke her own Spotify record by becoming the most-streamed artist in a single day in the streamer’s history, while “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” became Spotify’s most-streamed album in a single day this year.
Born in Pennsylvania, Swift started writing country songs on guitar in her early teens. Her father shifted his job in financial services to the country music capital of Nashville to allow her a chance in the industry.
After winning a growing mainstream audience for her introspective country songs, Swift switched to a thoroughly pop direction for her fifth studio album – “1989,” named after her year of birth.