This was the year of Taylor Swift. The same could have been said of 2023 – and, arguably, pretty much every year in the past decade – yet 2024 brought a new dimension to her dominance.
The 34-year-old American singer-songwriter became inescapable: a relentless one-woman carousel of shiny costumes, bright smiles and singalong choruses, plastered across the news, ubiquitous on social media, streaming on all platforms and live on stage in a city near you.
Her Eras tour comprised 149 shows spanning five continents, including a record-breaking eight-night residency at Wembley Stadium. It outdid such veteran superstars as U2, Coldplay, Ed Sheeran and Madonna, and even left Elton John and the Rolling Stones in the dust, to become the first US$2 billion ($3.5b) tour.
This summer, Britain went more than a little Taylor mad. Fans dressed up in outfits inspired by her songs, and cutouts of Swift’s face peered from high-street windows. Famous admirers were spotted at Wembley – Hugh Grant, Paul McCartney, Tom Cruise and the Prince of Wales among them. (Swift also held a controversial meet and greet with the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, amid the horrible fallout of a slaughter of innocents at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport.)
Swift’s latest album, The Tortured Poets Department (released in April), was far and away the most successful of the year. It topped the US charts for 15 weeks (nine and counting in the UK), while Swift also briefly colonised all top 14 spots in the Billboard singles Hot 100. Five other Swift albums also featured among the UK’s top 30 bestsellers. Nobody else came close.
What lies at the root of this total cultural takeover? Throughout her career – she already has 18 years as a recording artist under her belt – Swift has proved herself astonishingly good at every aspect of the music business. She’s as adept at marketing as songwriting, as comfortable in the boardroom as in the studio, and displays a remarkable instinct for the ways art and business bind together. She has been a particularly canny operator on social media, deftly weaving a soap-opera narrative from her complicated love life.
Her frankly fantastic live show was the work of a world-class performer, a dazzling combination of heart and spectacle. To any sceptics left sniffing on the sidelines, I’d urge you to unplug your ears. Across 11 studio albums, in elegantly constructed, dazzlingly detailed gems of wit, emotion, psychological insight and earworm hooks, Swift has established a distinctive place in the pantheon of pop songwriters. Bruce Springsteen recently declared her “a tremendous writer”, and I’d go so far as to say that Swift offers Springsteen-like levels of commitment, charisma, stamina and passion – all while dancing backwards in high heels.
It’s noteworthy that, even from her lofty position of mega-stardom, Swift has become such a significant vehicle for expressing the inner lives and day-to-day concerns of women of her generation (and younger). It brings to mind the way Springsteen became a chronicler of the dreams, disappointments, daily hardships and triumphs of blue-collar working life – tapping deep into the psyche of the ordinary man – despite (as he himself has noted) never having held down a regular job or “worked a day” in his own life.
Swift was born into privilege, has been financially and emotionally supported to pursue her musical vocation since she was a young child, and has been lionised throughout her career, yet manages to intuit all the insecurities and aspirations of everyday existence and turn her own inner life into something that speaks to the world in this moment. Perhaps, above all, that is the secret of her phenomenal success.
Take Swift out of the picture and it remains overwhelmingly the case that, in 2024, pop was dominated by women. Again, this is nothing new. The empowerment of female artists has been among the key trends of this century so far, as women have shifted from occupying historically fewer than 25% of all chart positions to registering half of hits in the UK. This year, though, you could have been forgiven for asking, where have music’s men gone?
Alongside Swift, Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo explored the female psyche in pop smashes, while the breakout artists of the year were the witty American singer-songwriters Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan, both peddling what might be viewed as a version of Swift’s oeuvre. Our own reigning dance-pop star, Dua Lipa, headlined Glastonbury Festival (even as her bid for world domination seemed to stall with an underpowered third album, Radical Optimism).
Meanwhile, Britain’s long-serving electronic alt-pop maverick Charli XCX suddenly found herself the embodiment of the zeitgeist. Her playful appropriation of the word “brat” as an expression of hedonistic rebellion was identified as the Collins Dictionary word of the year. It also served as the title of perhaps the year’s most acclaimed album, certainly the most successful by a contemporary British artist.
In fact, it was the only album by a contemporary British artist to flourish in annual charts once again dominated by oldies (and Taylor Swift). At the time of writing, two-thirds of the year’s 30 bestselling albums were greatest hits and catalogue releases. That is a disheartening trend that doesn’t seem to be going away. The future of albums is firmly stuck in the past.
The more streaming-friendly singles charts arguably better represent the state of modern listening – and there a rather surprising genre was flourishing. This was the year Britain went country, a boom I never thought I would see. Yee-haw!
For decades, the country music market has been huge in America yet marginal pretty much everywhere else (although there was a lot of it about when I was growing up in Ireland, and I gather Australia also has a taste for the twang). But something about the way streaming algorithms disseminate new music – “if you like that, you might like this …” – has helped push US country artists across cultural barriers.
I also blame Taylor Swift for this. After all, she started out as a country artist and her version of pop retains the genre’s narrative lyrical impulse and many of its musical signifiers, softening up her expansive fanbase for a taste of the hard stuff.
In Cowboy Carter, R&B superstar Beyoncé produced the year’s most ambitious and complex country-influenced album, although she didn’t really reap the rewards. I suspect what modern audiences want from country is not futurism, but rather a conservative return to melodic, singalong, narrative pop values. The biggest hit of the year was Stick Season, a lovelorn but spritely acoustic campfire strum-along with a banjo solo, originally released in 2022, by the American country-adjacent singer-songwriter Noah Kahan. It was closely rivalled by Beautiful Things by Benson Boone, another American, who brought soul and a 1990s rock edge to his own country-inflected lovelorn ballad.
These songs are deeply old fashioned with little hint of electronica, synths or dance grooves, and could have been hits in pretty much any earlier era. Like the success of Swift (whose biggest individual song this year was the similarly old-fashioned Cruel Summer), it suggests modern listeners crave something authentic, favouring emotional storytelling over sonic adventure.
Less heartening is the fact that not one UK artist featured in 2024’s top 10 most-listened-to UK singles. It is a trend that should strike fear throughout our music business, which otherwise has been revelling in big returns from overinflated live ticket prices and the lingering rewards of our historically overachieving vintage stars.
According to the annual report from the trade body UK Music, the music industry contributed £7.6 billion ($16.9b) in gross value added (GVA) to the domestic economy, and generated £4.6b in export revenues, both solid increases on recent (Covid-afflicted) years.
But Britain’s share of a growing global market is shrinking, down to less than 10%, and most of that is based on long-established talent. Yes, Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones are still touring and we have world-beaters in Coldplay, Harry Styles, Ed Sheeran and Adele. But after that … who is next?
Well, the answer for now appears to be Oasis. In August, the battling Gallagher brothers buried the hatchet long enough to stand side by side for a five-minute photoshoot, to announce the most newsworthy reunion of the year. In 2025, Britpop is back. God help us all.
The Kiwi actor has been part of the Star Wars universe for more than 20 years.