Pop

For this year’s update of our ongoing Greatest Pop Star by Year project, Billboard will be counting down our editorial staff picks for the 10 Greatest Pop Stars of 2024 all this week — you can see the artists we’ve already counted down, plus our Honorable Mentions, Comeback of the Year and our Rookie of the Year artists all right here. Now, at No. 3, we remember the year in Taylor Swift — another historic 12 months for the unquestioned biggest pop star of the 2020s.

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Taylor Swift ended with a finale, then another, then another. That’s how the last surprise song of the Eras Tour played out, at the record-setting trek’s final performance on Dec. 8 in Vancouver: sitting down at a piano adorned with decorative flowers, Swift performed a mash-up of “Long Live” and “New Year’s Day” — the closing tracks on Speak Now and Reputation, respectively — as the parting acoustic performance of the stadium trek.She oscillated between verses, then choruses, mixing images of gratitude and hushed togetherness in the middle of thousands of breathless fans. 

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Then, Swift added one more coda: the outro of “The Manuscript,” the final song on this year’s The Tortured Poets Department. “Now and then, I re-read the manuscript,” Swift sang to close out the acoustic medley, “but the story isn’t mine anymore.” The echoing piano notes and bittersweet remembrances of “The Manuscript” stand in stark contrast with the final song on 2022’s Midnights, the Tortured Poets predecessor: on “Mastermind,” Swift portrays herself as the ultimate puppet master of romance, as synth-pop hooks function like gears in an immaculately constructed machine. 

Shortly after the aching few seconds of “The Manuscript” in Vancouver, Swift was performing “Mastermind” as part of the Midnights set, commanding her dancers around the middle of the stage like pieces on a literal chess board – pristine pop maximalism after lump-in-throat intimacy. No other artist on the planet can navigate that tonal juxtaposition so effortlessly, and have it define another impossibly successful year.

Swift’s 2023 was awe-inspiring, the type of monumental career year where you could name a handful of different defining accomplishments — from the launch of Eras to “Anti-Hero” becoming her longest-leading Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hit to “Cruel Summer” receiving a viral explosion to a pair of enormous Taylor’s Version releases — and still leave a dozen others on the table. She was named our editorial staff’s Greatest Pop Star of 2023, after winning in 2021 and 2015 before that – the only artist to top our list twice in three years, and three times total. Swift was the biggest star on the planet when 2023 began, and by the end, she was one of the biggest stars ever to grace this planet.

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And Swift remained at a commercial level in 2024 that none of her peers could approach, across all platforms — if this list was based solely on numbers, she would be No. 1 this year, and most years. Yet in 2024, Swift balanced the enormity of her superstardom with the most vulnerable music of her career, including songs written about the trappings of that superstardom. The heights she had reached gained greater nuance; her fans got a peek behind the curtain of the greatest show on earth. And Swift’s artistic gamble paid off handsomely, with fresh songwriting ground explored, more records broken, and a new era added, literally and figuratively, to the most sprawling show of her career.

Swift announced the April release of The Tortured Poets Department on a night where she made history: at the 2024 Grammy Awards in February, Midnights won the album of the year trophy, giving Swift a record-setting fourth career win in the category (after Fearless, 1989 and Folklore). The revelation came out of nowhere, as Swift had been on the Eras tour since March 2023, with little downtime between stadium shows; most fans expected her next announcement to focus on the final two re-recorded albums in her back catalog, after Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) and 1989 (Taylor’s Version) became chart-topping successes in 2023.

Yet on a night where Swift was the big winner, she told the world that she was pushing forward, with her fourth new full-length in five years. “All’s fair in love and poetry,” she wrote in an Instagram post revealing the grayscale album artwork, a message and image indicating that the reigning album of the year would receive a dramatic follow-up.

When The Tortured Poets Department arrived in April, the mastermind at the end of Midnights had been shape-shifted into a self-saboteur — heartbroken at times, pissed-off at others, with scores to settle but an obligation to the megawatt life she had constructed for herself. Working once again with Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, Swift refracted the warm synth-pop and rustic indie-folk of her past few projects through an even moodier prism, and the songs shrugged off radio-friendly hooks in favor of insecurities and unruly thoughts. (Of course, there was one dart aimed at top 40: “Fortnight,” the opening track featuring Post Malone, a downtempo electro-pop duet that builds into a sweeping belt-along. It begins with dejected murder fantasies and ends with dreams of an escape to the state of Florida — no, the old Taylor still can’t come to the phone.)

Tortured Poets represented a wonderfully tangled knot of emotions hoisted up to the light; it was over an hour long, and quickly became much longer, with its 16 tracks joined by 15 more on streaming services hours after its release, for a double album dubbed The Anthology. The album confounded some critics upon its release, but was roundly embraced by fans as their favorite artist’s most unguarded statement to date. And as the commercial highs of 2023 were carried into the new year, Swift dominated the charts in ways that were downright mind-boggling — she was only competing with her past self, and she was winning.

The Tortured Poets Department debuted with 2.61 million equivalent album units, including 1.91 million pure album sales — the biggest bow of the decade and numbers exceeded only by Adele in the past 20 years, the best debut of Swift’s career, coming deep in the streaming era, when these sorts of debuts weren’t supposed to be possible anymore. Meanwhile, all 31 songs on the double-album hit the Hot 100, and Swift owned the entire top 14, including “Fortnight” clocking in at No. 1. Consumption records fell, streaming charts were flooded, and the best week for vinyl sales belonged to Swift once again, after Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) set the record last year. Plenty of A-list pop projects were released before and after The Tortured Poets Department this calendar year, but Swift created a seismic event – no other artist managed even one-sixth of those first-week numbers.

And then, the album stayed at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 for months… then left, and came back… and still, eight months later, sits on top. The Tortured Poets Department has logged 17 consecutive weeks atop the albums chart, thanks in part to high demand for its physical variants, such as the recent release of The Anthology on vinyl. It’s now Swift’s longest-running No. 1 album, even breezing by era-defining blockbusters Fearless and 1989, which each posted 11 weeks in the top spot. That longevity demonstrates the increased consumer demand for all things Taylor — after all, we’re only three years removed from Evermore earning four total weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. But this is not 2021, and Swift is far more impactful now than she was even at the beginning of this decade.

The Eras Tour reached four countries at the beginning of 2024, before The Tortured Poets Department was released in April, and its setlist was revamped to include the newest era when the tour resumed in May. Through the rest of the year, the blockbuster live run included headline-grabbing surprises: Swift’s boyfriend, NFL star Travis Kelce, appearing onstage at Wembley Stadium was probably the biggest gasp-getter, but Ed Sheeran, Florence Welch and Antonoff also dropped by for guest turns; meanwhile, a thwarted terrorist attack planned for the tour’s weekend in Vienna resulted in the scheduled performances being cancelled, with Swift later calling the ordeal “devastating.”

Perhaps the most underrated accomplishment of the Eras Tour, however, was how it minted new stars, at least partly in Swift’s own image, when she wasn’t even onstage. The tour began 2024 with Sabrina Carpenter as the opening act, a former Disney Channel standout trying to secure a crossover hit; by the end of the year, Carpenter had scored several of them, from “Espresso” to “Please Please Please” to “Taste,” and has become an undeniable A-lister with top-notch lyricism as her superpower.

And as Swift concluded the Eras run in December, she did so with a lead-in from Gracie Abrams, a former best new artist Grammy nominee whose positive buzz has turned into durable hits like “That’s So True” and “I Love You, I’m Sorry.” Carpenter headlined arenas in 2024 after leaving the Eras tour, and in 2025, Abrams will do the same, with confessional singer-songwriter anthems that leave no doubt about who is her artistic north star. The next generation of Swift acolytes stretches far beyond those two artists, but their respective successes can partially be traced back to those nights winning over hundreds of thousands of concertgoers, and millions more livestreaming each date around the globe.

The conclusion of the Eras tour has coincided with more accolades for Swift, at the end of 2024 and possibly at the beginning of the next one: after becoming the artist with the most Billboard Music Award wins of all time, she might extend her album of the year Grammys record, since The Tortured Poets Department could earn her a fifth career win. Eras concluded with over $2 billion in reported ticket sales – the must-attend concert event of this century becoming the highest-grossing tour of all time, bar none – and as she is crowned Billboard’s Top Artist of 2024, fans are still speculating whether Reputation (Taylor’s Version) and her re-recorded self-titled debut will be unveiled soon, and potentially push her towards the Top Artist of 2025.

Yet another astonishing year for Swift reverberated beyond the honorifics. This year, we got a Lifetime holiday movie not-so-subtly inspired by Swift and Kelce, and an uptick in streams for The Darkness when the couple sang their song at the U.S. Open. Both candidates for president of the United States quickly responded when Swift made her endorsement of Kamala Harris — a meaningful declaration from a proud “childless cat lady” that resulted in thousands of newly registered voters. And, oh hey, she got to kiss her boyfriend after he won the Super Bowl as the entire world watched.

As she keeps working at a breakneck pace and upending expectations of her artistry, Swift exists in the very fabric of modern-day culture, to the point where it’s impossible to imagine popular music without her presence. She may never match her 2023 again, the biggest year for a solo artist over the last 40 years – but then again, who knows, this is Taylor Swift we’re talking about. 

She has figured out how to be omnipresent while still taking risks and evolving in compelling directions. Swift will continue to tell her story, while also understanding that, as the world’s biggest artist, the story isn’t hers anymore.

See the rest of our top 10, along with our Honorable Mentions and Rookie and Comeback of the Year artists all right here — and then come back for the announcement of our top two Greatest Pop Stars of 2024 on Monday, Dec. 23!