Why do so many people like Taylor Swift’s music? Demystifying Swift’s ever-growing popularity

Image edited by Riley Wong.

“Put narcotics into all of my songs, and that’s why you’re still singing along...”

Taylor Swift remarks sardonically in her 2024 satirical song Who’s Afraid Of Little Old Me.

The Pennsylvania-born singer-songwriter's stratospheric stardom truly appears unprecedented and unparalleled. Not too long since her 2016 “cancellation”, Swift has returned with a series of record-breaking achievements: she broke the Spotify record for most streamed album in a single day with her 2022 album Midnights, only to overtake herself with The Tortured Poets Department in 2024. She became the most awarded solo act at the VMAs with 30 moon men, surpassing Beyonce’s previous record of 25. These aren’t just numbers she has collected in her career: clearly, Swift is one of the most prominent figures in pop culture.

Swift made history by being the first artist to occupy the entire top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

Now, think of some of the criticisms directed at Swift’s artistry: “She’s boring.” “She only writes about boys.” “All her songs sound the same.” Trolling aside, why do non-listeners – or, really, non-understanders – of her music propagate such arguments? Of course, the irony is that, by tirelessly bringing up her name under every non-related content, haters are in fact perpetuating and increasing her relevance and visibility. But perhaps there are some aspects of Swift’s popularity that seem mystified to the general audience, and which need to be analysed and clarified.

Given the long and complex history of Swift’s artistic career, it’s impossible to cover every thread of her story in this article alone — her fan interaction, sartorial conversations and activism, for example – each a vital node in a complex nexus of icons and issues deserving of their own discussions. Instead, I’m here to present an overview of what makes Swift’s music so special, relatable and beloved. Rather than close analysis of her songs (which are in the hundreds), let’s investigate the broader paradigms of storytelling and culture that have shaped and continue to shape Swift’s ever-evolving discography and ever-growing popularity. 

Her songs are popular because of the lyrical verisimilitude rendered.

Now a pop superstar, Swift has a country music pedigree. Pop and country, traditionally, are two ends of the songwriting spectrum. Pop is a celebration of the mass audience, often written with overreaching generalities to capture and reflect the emotions and ambitions of as many people as possible. Meanwhile, country is focused on storytelling grounded in the details of the artist’s personal experience. Swift’s songwriting falls in the middle of this pop-country continuum, balancing the specificity of autobiographical recounting with the broadness of more widely-resonating themes. Shared experiences like healing from a heartbreak, being lovelorn, growing up and navigating a relentlessly scrutinising world are refracted through Swift’s unique, personal, mature and growing lens. It’s why so many listeners can relate to her songs while getting to know the storyteller herself.

Before pivoting to pop as her primary genre, Swift was a country star. (Image from Rolling Stone)

Yes, a lot of Swift’s songs focus on romance – this isn’t necessarily a problem. At her core, Swift is a hopeless romantic who is also self-aware and reflexive, often singing about how her desperation for and optimism in love put her in vulnerable situations, and how she reacts in them. But she’s also candid, resilient and self-critical, extricating herself from failing relationships and precarious positions. These interesting dualities animate many of her songs, in which she explores the breadths and depths of her personal relationships.

If anything, Swift demonstrates perfectly that love is multidimensional, often incorporating extended metaphors to dissect its nuances. For example, in How Did It End (2024), Swift investigates a breakup like an autopsy (“we hereby conduct this post-mortem”), seeking answers for the people who demand the full story – and ultimately, for herself. The answer she finds, however, is that sometimes there is no answer: “But I still don’t know, how did it end?” In Foolish One (2023): she catches herself being increasingly invested in an unrequited infatuation and chastises herself for it (“you are not the exception, you will never learn your lesson”). But Swift understands that optimism is wisdom as well: she reassures herself, despite falling for the wrong people, “the day is gonna come for your confessions of love”. This Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) “From The Vault” song is one of the many that prove that Swift has the empathic ability to adopt a perspective beyond her own, be it talking to herself in second-person, or singing through the points of view of third parties (see: the last great american dynasty and one of my personal favourites When Emma Falls In Love).

Lore builds context and stakes. Each album is like a diary entry, a chapter of reflection in real time, embedded in Swift’s lived experiences. These portraits of different time periods in her life coalesce into an emergent, complex painting that comes to life with rich detail. Some speak of this tapestry of interwoven stories as the Taylor Swift Cinematic Universe, which rewards fan investment with recurring icons and hidden surprises. Think about how each album is associated closely with a distinct colour, and how these colours are repeated in the Eras Tour marketing, in music videos, and even in her nail polish. A connected cinematic universe also incentivises long-term interest for the sake of understanding the entire canon, much like how many of Marvel Cinematic Universe’s movies build upon previous entries, prompting fans to visit – or revisit – those before watching new projects.

For Swift, this long-term interest is bolstered by the buzz surrounding public sightings of her, which often directly dovetail with her works. Shortly before the summer of 2023, Swift was seen repeatedly with The 1975 singer Matty Healy, leading to speculations about their relationship; less than a year later, she (ostensibly) details the turmoils of said relationship in her 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department. And now, with the frequent romantic outings she shares with American footballer Travis Kelce, fans are already expecting this new, passionate relationship to be the subject of “TS12”. Swift’s discography is designed to mutually work with her public life: added interest in one reinforces that in the other.

Popularity involves a symbiotic relationship between the artist and the cultural milieu.

When metabolised by the mass audience, Swift’s discography expands into iconography. One cannot turn 22 in age without thinking of the 2012 earworm 22. Neither can one decouple the excitement of setting foot in New York City, or any “big old city” (Mean, 2010), from the 2014 anthemic soundtrack Welcome To New York. The vocabulary surrounding her works expand the cultural lexicon on social media, which trickles into real life: how many times have you heard someone say “I’m in my [insert description] era,” be it online or in a conversation, which is inspired by Swift’s Instagram post caption “in my Eras era”? 

Beyond her discography, many trends have also emerged because of Swift’s projects, especially The Eras Tour. The record-breaking stadium tour has given rise to the “I hope she plays [insert a Taylor Swift song]...” meme, often re-enacted in a concert by another artist, or any a setting involving a large audience, influencing how we perceive live performances and events. Even in a non-Taylor Swift context, her cultural impact on the genre remains visible and palpable.

This is but one example of user-generated content, which has burgeoned with the predominance of social media platforms. Swift has certainly adapted to the immense availability of such organic marketing: she now doesn’t do much promotion on mass media, not only because she doesn’t need to, but because there’s a broader shift in the nature of consumer demand for pop music. With the widespread adoption of the short video content format popularised by TikTok and Instagram Reels, there is greater emphasis on virality, at the cost of lifespan. Swift’s release strategy has shifted from months of anticipation-building (as seen in her 2019 four-month-long rollout of pre-release singles for Lover), to instantaneous content-dropping. The turning point was the surprise release of 2020's folklore: Swift only announced this folk pop album the night before making it fully available.

More recently, Swift’s tactic has turned from surprising the audience to blindsiding them. For both Midnights and The Tortured Poets Department, Swift announced them a few months prior, but remained relatively silent about them, without a single tease of the material. This left a lot of mystery about the sonic style and subject matter of the albums. Arguably there was some bait and switch: in Midnights, the mid-century visual aesthetic in its promotional material led many to believe its sound would be more retro than its actual, modern synth-pop genre; in TTPD many were expecting a detailed autopsy (which she cleverly bemoans in How Did It End) of her failed six-year relationship with Joe Alwyn, but instead a new long-term love interest was revealed in a surprising plot twist — Matty Healy. 

The retro aesthetic of 2022's pop album Midnights seems anachronistic. (Image from Teen Vogue)

Further, the treatment of Swift’s “deluxe” catalogues has certainly changed. Whereas there had been intervals spanning months between standard and deluxe (reputation indeed did not even have one), the (first of several) deluxe variants of Midnights and TTPD were put out in a matter of hours. The latter was even declared part of a double album release, with 15 additional tracks – enough to fit a whole other album. Coupled with the interspersed Taylor’s Version re-recordings (which themselves come with never-before-heard “From The Vault” music), the game plan here is clearly volume: with so much new content released so quickly, Swift is certain to trend. This isn’t to accuse her of prioritising quantity over quality, but to highlight a salient shift in release strategy that capitalises on how quickly social media digests content. While her older works depended on gradual momentum, Swift’s newer albums have been built on immense moments of undivided attention and hype, sustained through sprinkles of singles and promotion, but mainly through more user-generated content. 

Much as Swift shapes culture, she is also shaped by it. Ultimately, pop stars are shapeshifters: to appeal to the widest possible market, one has to fit within the confines of the culture. Swift’s discography, gliding across genres and motifs, is structured to the vicissitudes of the predominant cultural milieu. Obviously, there’s her transition from country to pop from Red to 1989, where she realised a full-fledged pop sound in a time when country’s relevance had been fading from the mainstream. But there’s a subtler shift in tone in her works: as Swift matures and as the audience demands more authenticity from artists while favouring ironic humour, her songs also become more illuminating and revealing, more vulnerable and self-deprecating. In many of her older songs, she is adamant about having the upper hand: in Better Than Revenge she’s the arbiter of morality; in Mean, she calls out a critic who denigrated her for her vocal abilities, before proceeding to mock him. 

There used to be, ostensibly, an act of cleansing or purifying when shaping her track lists: vault songs like Nothing New (2021), first written in the Red (2012) timeframe, had possibly been removed from their original albums because of their ill self-depictions – an alcoholic, in the case of Nothing New. Contrastingly, in newer songs that sound more jocular than their thematic gravity like Anti-Hero (2022) and I Can Do It With A Broken Heart (2024), Swift makes light of personal struggles, indexing the more satirical mood her later works are imbued with. And then there is a matter of cultural timing: in the 1989 (Taylor’s Version) vault track “Slut!”, released in 2023, she calls out the misogynistic slut-shaming directed to her by fandoms around the time of the original album’s release (2014). Her commentary here benefits from hindsight – had she released the song back then, it would have been taken as more incendiary.

There’s only one Taylor Swift.

Swift is not impervious to the demands and changes of the broader pop culture; she is both influenced by and influences the landscape. But despite the fickleness of fame, perhaps the ultimate reason people keep coming back is because there simply isn’t a second Taylor Swift out there –  her artistry is a prodigious skill, not a replicable formula. “It’s important to emphasise that it’s incredibly difficult to write a song like the songs Taylor writes,” says Toby Koenigsberg, Associate Professor and Chair of Popular Music at the University of Oregon. “It's difficult to do even one time. To do it across an entire album is much harder still, and she has been doing it on album after album for close to two decades now.”