En sixteen titles, fifteen more in its downloadable version, Taylor Swift builds her legend even further. On April 19, the most famous American pop star released, in the middle of a world tour, The Tortured Poets Department, his eleventh studio album. This new record, listened to more than three hundred million times on Spotify in a single day – a new record – recalls the iconic status of the 34-year-old singer, who recently became a billionaire. Fifteen years earlier, Taylor Swift was still called “young “country pop” music singer” in a brief article from World from December 21, 2009, which lists the topics most searched for online by young Americans that same year.
In the columns of the newspaper, the rise to power of the artist, who first became famous in Nashville, the capital of country music in Tennessee, can only be read in bits and pieces. In February 2010, an AFP report specified that the interpreter of Fearless won Best Album at the Grammy Awards; the same year, in November, in a long portrait of Kanye West, the journalist Véronique Mortaigne recalls how, a year earlier, the rapper snatched a microphone from Taylor Swift’s hands in the middle of the ceremony. MTV Video Awards. THE “boss” of American hip-hop would have been frustrated that Beyoncé was not rewarded, unlike the “blonde country singer”.
Symbol of her popularity, Taylor Swift was spotted in 2014, among other celebrities, in the front row of Madison Square Garden, in New York, before a basketball match. “The youngest recognize Taylor Swift, who has just bought herself a New York identity with a $20 million penthouse and the promise of donating the profits from her latest record to the city’s public schools,” then describes Guillemette Faure.
At the same time, the singer became the one who could “save the recording industry single-handedly”. In a short portrait published in M The magazine of the World, Pierre Jaxel-Truer lists the figures of his success: 1989, his fifth album, sold more than a million copies in one week, became the best debut of a record in twelve years. And, with $51 million in income, Taylor Swift placed second in the ranking of the highest-paid singers in the world, just behind Beyoncé that year.
The star makes Apple fold
Spotted at 14 and became famous at 17, the young artist removed her songs from the streaming platforms Spotify and Deezer, to protest against the very low remuneration of online artists. The following year, in this “battle of streaming”, the star even makes Apple fold. Before changing its mind, the American giant had planned not to pay artists during the three-month free trial of its new Apple Music platform. “The young woman also wants to be the spokesperson for all artists in the face of the rise of streaming offers”, says Jérôme Marin, from San Francisco. According to Michel Guerrin, in a column from June 2015 recalling this commercial standoff, the “holy Taylor Swift” seems impossible to stop. In a tweet, rocker Elvis Costello agrees: “Taylor Swift, President!” »
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