(New York) American pop star Taylor Swift, who shook the music industry with a phenomenally successful tour, was named Time magazine’s 2023 Person of the Year on Wednesday.
“Much of what (Taylor) Swift has accomplished in 2023 is immeasurable […] She is committed to giving value to the dreams, feelings and experiences of people, especially women, who felt neglected and regularly underestimated,” noted the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Sam Jacobs.
“For building a world that was her own but made room for so many people, for making her story a global legend, for bringing joy to a society that desperately needed it, Taylor Swift is the person of the year 2023,” he continued.
“The first person in the arts to be named Person of the Year for her success as an artist,” Taylor Swift was chosen over a list of eight other “finalists,” which included Russian and Chinese leaders Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, British King Charles III, US Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, as well as OpenAI boss Sam Altman, Hollywood strikers, prosecutors who indicted Donald Trump and… the character of Barbie, at the center of the cinema box office of the year.
She succeeds Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and the “spirit of Ukraine.”
At 33, the singer whose career began in Nashville, the birthplace of country, more than fifteen years ago, adds distinction to a long list of hits and records, her albums or their reissues frequently occupying the top spots American charts, as at the moment with 1989 (Taylor’s Version), at the top of the Billboard 200.
For the past year, she has also distinguished herself by criticizing the ticketing juggernaut Ticketmaster for the cacophony around ticket sales for her tour, which led the platform, often criticized for its monopoly position, to have to explain itself before the American Congress.
Since his first opus in 2006, thirteen of his fourteen albums have been ranked number one in sales in the United States, but his career has taken on yet another new dimension in 2023, with a tour, The Eras Tour, which promises to exceed one billion dollars in revenue, a first in the history of the music industry.
The concerts were adapted for the cinema, where they broke attendance records.
A formidable businesswoman, and billionaire according to Forbes, the singer of Shake it off and Cruel Summer is also known for her snub to the excesses of the music industry: to recover the lost rights to her first albums, she re-recorded and sales of these new editions were a hit.
“Imagine Picasso painting something he painted a few years earlier, and recreating his work with more current colors,” compares Universal Music Group CEO Lucian Grainge in Time.
The artist, adored by legions of fans, the “Swifties”, is also seen as a feminist icon, while her political positions are rare – she supported Joe Biden in 2020 – and weighed with a trebuchet.
“What has been around since the dawn of time? A patriarchal society. What fuels a patriarchal society? Money, income flows, the economy. So if we look at this in the most cynical way possible, the fact that women’s ideas are becoming more lucrative means that there will be more women’s artwork being produced. “It’s extremely encouraging,” she said Wednesday in a rare, lengthy interview with Time.
She also confides in her new romantic relationship with the American football player of the Kansas City Chiefs, Travis Kelce, who delighted the celebrity pages, revealing that they began dating “for a significant time” before to appear in broad daylight.