Singer Taylor Swift emerges as most streamed artist of 2024

Pop icon Taylor Swift has yet again dominated the charts this year. Audio streaming platform Spotify has released its much-awaited year end data with Spotify Wrapped 2024, and Taylor Swift is again at the top.

The singer-songwriter ranked as the Number 1 most-streamed artist globally in 2024 on Spotify, nabbing the crown for the second year in a row, reports ‘Variety’.

That’s largely on the strength of her latest album, ‘The Tortured Poets Department’, which was the most-streamed album of the year on Spotify. All told, Swift’s music generated more than 26.6 billion streams on the platform this year.

After Swift, Spotify’s most-streamed artists of the year worldwide were the Weeknd, Bad Bunny, Drake and Billie Eilish.

As per ‘Variety’, Swift’s ‘Tortured Poets’ broke several Spotify records, including becoming the first album to top 300 million streams in one day and more than 1 billion in the first week of release. Its massive popularity led to a banner year for women artists — who landed the top eight of the 10 most-streamed albums worldwide on Spotify.

Those were ‘Hit Me Hard and Soft’ by Billie Eilish, Sabrina Carpenter’s ‘Short n’ Sweet’, Karol G’s ‘Manana Sera Bonito’, Ariana Grande’s ‘Eternal Sunshine’, Swift’s ‘1989 (Taylor’s Version)’, SZA’s ‘SOS’ and Swift’s ‘Lover’.

For the first time, Spotify is adding a Wrapped badge to Taylor Swift’s Spotify profile, marking the inaugural year of what the company says will be an annual distinction.

Meanwhile, Spotify’s most-streamed songs worldwide in 2024 were: Sabrina Carpenter’s ‘Espresso’, with more than 1.6 billion streams globally, followed by Benson Boone’s ‘Beautiful Things’, Eilish’s ‘Birds of a Feather’, ‘Gata Only’ by FloyyMenor and Cris MJ, and Teddy Swims’ ‘Lose Control’.

Spotify also unveiled the top podcasts of the year, led by ‘The Joe Rogan Experience’ and Alex Cooper’s ‘Call Her Daddy’.

Swift signed to Big Machine Records in 2005 starting as a country singer with the albums Taylor Swift (2006) and Fearless (2008). Her singles “Teardrops on My Guitar”, “Love Story”, and “You Belong with Me” found crossover success on country and pop radio formats. She experimented with rock on Speak Now (2010) and electronic on Red (2012), later re-calibrating her image from country to pop with the synth-pop album 1989 (2014); the ensuing media scrutiny inspired the hip-hop-imbued Reputation (2017). The albums contained the Billboard Hot 100 number-one singles “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”, “Shake It Off”, “Blank Space”, “Bad Blood” and “Look What You Made Me Do”.

Shifting to Republic Records in 2018, Swift released the electropop album Lover (2019) and the autobiographical documentary Miss Americana (2020), explored indie folk styles in the 2020 albums Folklore and Evermore, and subdued pop genres on Midnights (2022) and The Tortured Poets Department (2024).

Agencies