Taylor Swift named Time’s ‘Person of the Year’
By Jordan Valinsky, CNN
New York (CNN) — Taylor Swift is ending her year with another accolade: The pop superstar was named Time magazine’s 2023 “Person of the Year,” beating out Barbie and King Charles III.
“While her popularity has grown across the decades, this is the year that Swift, 33, achieved a kind of nuclear fusion: shooting art and commerce together to release an energy of historic force,” the magazine said.
Time said Swift was selected because she found a way to give people around the world hope in some seriously dark times.
“No one else on the planet today can move so many people so well,” Time said in its profile. “Achieving this feat is something we often chalk up to the alignments of planets and fates, but giving too much credit to the stars ignores her skill and her power.”
The magazine also interviewed Swift, with the artist revealing that “this is the proudest and happiest I’ve ever felt, and the most creatively fulfilled and free I’ve ever been.”
And yes, she even talked about her relationship with Kansas City Chiefs star Travis Kelce for the first time publicly. The pair started hanging out after Kelce wore a friendship bracelet on his podcast, which Swift said was “metal as hell” and started to hang out after.
“I’m just there to support Travis,” she said about her appearances at NFL games that have given some of them a ratings boost. “I have no awareness of if I’m being shown too much and pissing off a few dads, Brads, and Chads.”
Part of Swift’s stunning year was her “Eras Tour,” which grossed about $2.2 billion in North American ticket sales alone, according to research firm QuestionPro. Also on Wednesday, StubHub released its 2023 “Year in Live Experiences” report revealing that the “Eras Tour” was StubHub’s biggest tour in the website’s history.
Swift has dominated not only Super Bowl-sized arenas, but local movie theaters as well.
In its opening weekend, the pop singer’s concert film, “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” raked in about $96 million in the box office in the United States and Canada, making it the highest-grossing concert film domestically for an opening weekend, according to AMC.
Among all of that, Swift broke her own Spotify record by becoming the most-streamed artist in a single day in the streamer’s history, while “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” became Spotify’s most-streamed album in a single day this year.
The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2023 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
