Taylor Alison Swift (born December 13, 1989) is an American singer-songwriter known for narrative songs about her personal life, which have received widespread media coverage. At age 14, she became the youngest artist signed by the Sony/ATV Music publishing house and, at 15, she signed with label Big Machine Records. Her 2006 eponymous debut album was the longest-charting album of the 2000s in the U.S. and its third single, "Our Song", made her the youngest person to single-handedly write and perform a number-one song on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. Swift's second album, Fearless, was released in 2008. Buoyed by the pop crossover success of the singles "Love Story" and "You Belong with Me", it became US' best-selling album of 2009. The album won four Grammy Awards, and Swift became the youngest Album of the Year winner. Swift was the sole writer of her 2010 album Speak Now, which debuted atop the Billboard 200 with over a million copies sold, and won her two Grammy Awards for its third single "Mean".
Swift's fourth album, the pop-leaning country project Red (2012) yielded her first Billboard Hot 100 number-one single, "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together", which along with the dubstep-influenced third single I Knew You Were Trouble experienced crossover success. For Swift's fifth album, the completely pop 1989 (2014), she won three Grammy Awards and became the first woman to win Album of the Year twice and the first woman in the Hot 100's history to succeed herself at the number one spot with the singles "Shake It Off" and "Blank Space". Her sixth album, Reputation (2017), made her the only act to have four consecutive albums sell one million copies in their first week in the U.S, while yielding her fifth Hot 100 number-one song, with "Look What You Made Me Do". Departing from the dark sound of its predecessor, her cheerful and brighter seventh album, Lover (2019) made Swift the only woman in history with six consecutive number-one album debuts in the US.
Having sold more than 50 million albums—including 32 million in the U.S.—and 150 million singles, Swift is one of the best-selling music artists of all time. As a songwriter, she has received awards from the Songwriters Hall of Fame and Nashville Songwriters Association, and was included in Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time list in 2015. She has won 10 Grammy Awards, one Emmy Award, 10 Video Music Awards, 12 Country Music Association Awards and six Guinness world records, while being the most-awarded act at the American Music Awards (29 wins) and most-awarded woman at the Billboard Music Awards (23 wins), and appearing in Time's list of the 100 most influential people in the world (2010, 2015, 2019). She also ranked first in the Forbes Celebrity 100 (2016 and 2019), and was the youngest to be featured in the magazine's listing of the 100 most powerful women (2015). In 2019, Billboard placed Swift at number eight on its list of "Greatest of All Time Artists"—the highest for an artist that debuted in the 21st century—and named her Woman of the Decade (2010s), while the American Music Awards named her Artist of the Decade (2010s).
