Taylor Alison Swift (born December 13, 1989) is an American singer-songwriter, record producer, and actress. She is best known for her narrative songwriting that often centers around her personal life, which has received widespread critical praise and media coverage. Born in West Reading, Pennsylvania, Swift relocated to Nashville, Tennessee in 2004 to pursue a career in music. At age 14, she became the youngest artist signed by the Sony/ATV Music publishing house and, at age 15, she signed her first record deal. Her 2006 eponymous debut studio album was the longest-charting album of the 2000s on the Billboard 200. 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 breakthrough second studio album, Fearless (2008), won four Grammy Awards and produced the pop-crossover hit singles "Love Story" and "You Belong with Me". It became the best-selling album of 2009 in the United States and was certified Diamond by the RIAA.
Swift's self-written third studio album, Speak Now (2010), spawned the Grammy-winning single "Mean", and her genre-bending fourth studio album, Red (2012), earned Swift her first Billboard Hot 100 number-one single, "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together". Her fifth studio album and first all-pop project, 1989 (2014), produced the number-one singles "Shake It Off", "Blank Space" and "Bad Blood", and won three Grammy Awards—including Album of the Year—making Swift the first woman to succeed herself at the top spot on the Hot 100 and the first woman to win Album of the Year twice as lead artist. Her hip hop-inspired sixth studio album, Reputation (2017), made her the first and only act in music history to have four albums each sell one million copies in their first week in the U.S. and generated her fifth Hot 100 number-one single, "Look What You Made Me Do". Her seventh studio album, Lover (2019), broke the record for the most simultaneous Hot 100 entries by a female artist and became the global best-selling studio album of 2019.
Having sold more than 50 million albums and 150 million singles globally, Swift is one of the world's best-selling music artists of all time. Her accolades include 10 Grammy Awards, an Emmy Award, and seven Guinness World Records; she is the most-awarded act and woman at the American Music Awards (29 wins) and Billboard Music Awards (23 wins), respectively. She has been included in multiple power rankings, such as Time's annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world (2010, 2015 and 2019), Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time (2015), the Forbes Celebrity 100 (placing first in 2016 and 2019), and Billboard's Greatest of All Time Artists Chart (placing eighth). She was named Global Recording Artist of the Year twice by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (2014 and 2019), Woman of the Decade (2010s) by Billboard and the Artist of the Decade (2010s) by the American Music Awards.
