Pop

It was a historic trip to the Grammy stage for Taylor Swift on Feb. 4, when she accepted her second and final award of the evening: album of the year, for her 2022 blockbuster set, Midnights. The win was her fourth in the category, breaking her out of a four-way tie and leaving her alone in the record books as the performing artist with the most album of the year wins in Grammy history. But by that point in the evening, Swift had already ensured that her fans were thinking more about the future — and perhaps AOTY trophy No. 5.

“I want to say thank you to the fans by telling you a secret that I’ve been keeping from you for the last two years — which is that my brand-new album comes out April 19,” Swift had revealed two hours earlier while accepting her first award of the night (best pop vocal album). “It’s called The Tortured Poets Department.”

A year after that announcement, Swift may indeed end up making more treks to the Crypto.com Arena stage thanks to the record-breaking Poets. While Midnights bowed with a jaw-dropping 1.6 million first-week units upon its October 2022 release (according to Luminate) and topped the Billboard 200 for six weeks — setting off the historic, globe-trotting Year of Taylor that followed in 2023 — it paled in comparison with Poets, which debuted with over 2.6 million units and spent a whopping 15 weeks atop the Billboard 200. Given that Swift has secured AOTY nominations for each of her three brand-new albums released this decade (including two wins, for Midnights and 2020’s folklore, of her four career total), Poets seems a lock for one of the eight AOTY slots at the 2025 ceremony.

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Whether Swift will win, however, is another question entirely — in part because of a remarkably strong and high-profile slate of likely competitors, including one particularly legendary perennial AOTY bridesmaid. But perhaps the most interesting question of all: After four AOTY wins, already unmatched in Grammy history, how much more does Swift really have to gain by adding another such statue to her collection?

While Swift has already triumphed among some strong fields this decade, it’s likely that the category’s 2025 slate of nominees — with its expected mix of huge critical and commercial successes from veteran A-listers and emergent superstars — will be the most formidable she has faced yet. Alex Tear, vp of music programming at SiriusXM and Pandora, mentions Billie Eilish (Hit Me Hard and Soft), Chappell Roan (The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess) and Sabrina Carpenter (Short n’ Sweet) as strong contenders for the marquee award, calling Carpenter “a force” in particular. “It’s really going to be a highly competitive year,” he says.

Still, the narrative surrounding the AOTY race will likely boil down to two names: Swift and Beyoncé, whose Billboard 200-topping country and Americana pivot, Cowboy Carter, will almost certainly also vie for the prize. Cowboy did only a fraction of Poets’ flabbergasting first-week numbers — though at press time, it still had the year’s second-highest debut total, at 375,000 units — but it received widespread acclaim, as well as immense media attention for its genre explorations and for the music history Beyoncé illuminated on it.

And of course, Carter’s candidacy comes with extra intrigue, given that Beyoncé — one of the most celebrated album artists of her era — has still never won album of the year, despite her four career nods for it (and record 32 total Grammy wins).

One longtime Recording Academy member who considers both Swift’s and Beyoncé’s new albums worthy contenders calls the latter “the prohibitive favorite” due to her careerlong shutout in the category. “I think that there’s a feeling in the industry, which was certainly encouraged via last year’s Grammys” — when her husband, Jay-Z, called attention to her AOTY shutout in a televised speech — “that [Beyoncé] has been overlooked for too long,” the member says.

Swift may well have less at stake in this year’s AOTY race than her storied competitor. In fact, because Swift is at the overall height of her career success and exposure (and therefore at risk of generating a backlash), it’s worth considering whether she stands to lose more than she does to gain by netting a fifth trophy, especially over a competitor with such a strong case — and such a strong sentimental pull for so many.

And public perception about a potential Swift victory could be colored by her own philosophy about the Grammys and awards shows in general. “She looks at record-making as a competitive sport in a way that other artists don’t,” the academy member says. “Other artists are competitive and would like to win Grammys, but she really, like, thinks about that stuff going in [to recording her albums].”

Swift has admitted as much over the years. In 2015, she explained in a Grammy Pro interview that when her Red lost AOTY in 2014 (to Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories), it set in motion her plan to make a more cohesive pop album with 1989, which won the award two years later: “You have a few options when you don’t win an award — you can decide, ‘Oh, they’re wrong…’ [or] you can say, ‘Maybe they’re right,’ ” she said. Similarly, her 2020 documentary, Miss Americana, captured her reaction when her 1989 follow-up, 2017’s Reputation, failed to garner even a nomination in the category: “I just need to make a better record.” (Two albums later, she would win the category again in 2021 for the stylistic left turn folklore.)

Competitiveness, of course, doesn’t equate to outright making Grammy bait, Tear points out — noting that it seems to have inspired Swift to grow artistically, while at the same time, “we’ve grown into her evolving as a person and the choices that she wants to make as an artist… The projects of late are not chasing where the puck is going — it’s already there.”

And though the Recording Academy member gives Beyoncé the edge in this particular race, it simply makes sense to them that the biggest pop star on the planet should be one of the favorites every time she’s in the mix.

“Look, [Swift] is the most popular recording artist on earth, and therefore she’s likely to win more often than not,” the member says, citing the famous Muhammad Ali quote, “It’s not bragging if you can back it up.” And Swift “can do it, God bless her. She should keep doing it. Maybe she’ll win album of the year several more times.”

This story appears in the Oct. 5, 2024, issue of Billboard.