Taylor Swift lambasts music industry and says Kim Kardashian feud ‘took me down psychologically’

In a lengthy interview as she is named Time’s person of the year, Swift speaks about toll of high-profile spat, and criticises music industry over treatment of young stars

Taylor Swift has spoken of the psychological damage of her feud with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, and lambasted the music industry over its treatments of young pop stars, in a new interview with Time, which has named her their person of the year.

After a year in which she has been at the centre of cultural conversations for her massively lucrative Eras tour, Swift spoke damningly of what she sees as a short-termist approach by record labels to replace, rather than nurture its stars. “By the time an artist is mature enough to psychologically deal with the job, they throw you out at 29, typically,” she says. “In the 90s and 00s, it seems like the music industry just said: ‘OK, let’s take a bunch of teenagers, throw them into a fire, and watch what happens. By the time they’ve accumulated enough wisdom to do their job effectively, we’ll find new teenagers.’” She said her solution was to change style with each new album project: “I realised every record label was actively working to try to replace me. I thought instead, I’d replace myself first with a new me. It’s harder to hit a moving target.”

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Taylor Swift postpones Rio concert after fan dies amid heatwave

Singer says safety comes first after death of Ana Clara Benevides Machado, 23, in sweltering stadium

Taylor Swift’s concert in Brazil on Saturday night has been postponed after a fan died shortly before the start of her gig in Rio de Janeiro on Friday.

The show’s organisers, Time4Fun (T4F), said in a statement that paramedics had attended to Ana Clara Benevides Machado, 23, at the concert venue and taken her to a hospital, where she died an hour later.

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Taylor Swift fans have reportedly lined up for five months ahead of Argentina shows

Pitchfork reports that hundreds of fans are sharing tents on a meticulously planned schedule to ensure they get the best spot when doors open next week

After a whirlwind excursion around the US that has generated billions of dollars in income and broken records for crowd size and seismic activity, Taylor Swift is taking her Eras tour to South America – and fans have reportedly been lining up for five months.

In Buenos Aires, a cadre of Swifties has been sleeping in tents outside River Plate Stadium, where Swift is set to open her Latin American leg with three shows from 9-11 November.

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UC Berkeley’s Taylor Swift class will examine her ‘enduring value’

Business school will offer a course studying the pop icon, following the success of her Eras tour and Taylor’s Version project

California’s UC Berkeley college will next year offer its students an unusual option for their studies in the form of a course about the pop icon Taylor Swift, whose current Eras tour has made her a billionaire.

Given the Eras project’s huge success, the course is being offered by Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. It will be called Artistry and Entrepreneurship: Taylor’s Version and start next spring, according to NBC News.

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BTS and Taylor Swift fans give Javier Milei and his running mate an earful

Argentinian Swifties say ‘Milei is Trump’ as devotees of BTS decry ‘hatred and xenophobia’ of Victoria Villarruel’s tweets about group

Weeks before Argentina’s run-off election, far-right populist Javier Milei and his running mate, Victoria Villaruel, have found themselves under pressure from an unexpected quarter: an alliance of Taylor Swift supporters and K-pop fans.

Milei, a radical libertarian who has proposed dollarizing Argentina’s economy and even legalizing the organ trade, topped the polls ahead of Sunday’s first round, but was beaten into second place by the centrist finance minister, Sergio Massa.

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Swift v Scorsese: Eras Tour beats Killers of the Flower Moon at US box office

Taylor Swift’s concert movie, now the biggest of all time, continues to dominate US box office despite release of Martin Scorsese’s anticipated crime drama

In a movie match-up almost as unlikely as Barbie and Oppenheimer, Martin Scorsese took on Taylor Swift in cinemas over the weekend. And while the US box office belonged for a second time to Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon got off to a strong start in Apple Studios’ first major theatrical gambit.

After a record-breaking opening weekend in North America of $92.8m, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour took in an estimated $31m over the weekend from 3,855 locations, according to AMC Theaters. In an unconventional deal, the theater chain is distributing Swift’s concert film, and playing it only Thursdays through Sundays.

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‘Swiftposium’: Australia to host academic conference on Taylor Swift

Event at University of Melbourne in February will explore singer’s influence on gender, mental health and urban landscapes

Australia is set to fulfil student Swifties’ wildest dreams when it hosts an international academic symposium in 2024 devoted to the global cultural and economic impact of Taylor Swift.

The three-day “Swiftposium”, hosted by the University of Melbourne from 11 to 13 February 2024, coincides with the singer’s Eras tour, which kicks off in Australia at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on 16 February.

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Taylor Swift becomes first woman to have four albums in US Top 10 at once

Singer is just third artist in history to have four albums in top 10 concurrently, with Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) becoming her 12th album to reach No. 1

Taylor Swift has become the first woman, and only the third artist ever, to have four albums in the Top 10 of the US album chart simultaneously, while also beating a record set by Barbra Streisand to become the female artist with the most No 1 albums in history.

The 33-year-old’s latest album, Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), has debuted at the top spot on the Billboard 200 with 716,000 album-equivalent units – a figure that combines physical sales with digital sales and streaming figures. It is the largest week for any album in 2023 and the best since her previous album, Midnights, was released last October.

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US vinyl sales up 21.7% for first half of 2023, report finds

Vinyl boom continues with another major leap and Taylor Swift’s Midnights leading the pack

Vinyl sales in the US are up 21.7% for the first half of 2023 over the same period last year, according to a new music industry report.

The vinyl resurgence is itself not new – 2022 marked the 17th consecutive year that sales of vinyl records rose, according to Luminate’s music midyear report. But the growth rate this year has reassured experts that the vinyl market did not hit a natural plateau after surging during the pandemic, which caused a 108% increase in 2021.

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How much is Taylor Swift making from the Australian concerts of her Eras tour?

It is estimated the seven shows will earn the singer $35m on top of the expected $700m for her US concerts

Australians will be playing their part in possibly inducting Taylor Swift into the billionaires club, with some industry insiders estimating the pop star could pocket as much as A$35m from the Australian leg of her Eras tour alone.

Estimates in the US put Swift’s earnings at an average of US$13.6m (A$20.5m) a show, based on an average ticket price of US$215, meaning she would gross more than US$700m from the 52 dates in the North American leg. That is without taking into account the more than 50 concerts she is performing around the world.

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Federal budget on track to smash surplus forecasts as cash balance hits $19bn – as it happened

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Melbourne hit by magnitude 4.6 earthquake

Melburnians were shaken by a magnitude 4.6 earthquake at 1.32am.

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Taylor Swift: extra tickets added with two more shows in Sydney and Melbourne announced

After an estimated 4 million people queued online for tickets on Wednesday the US pop star has announced two more Australian concert dates

Taylor Swift has announced two more shows in her Australian tour next February after record-setting ticket sales on Wednesday.

Presale tickets to three Sydney concerts and two in Melbourne sold out in hours after more than 4 million users joined the online queue for under half a million tickets – though some of the numbers may have been fans opening multiple browsers to maximise their chances.

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Taylor Swift Sydney and Melbourne presale tickets sold out after record 4m users join Ticketek queue

Australian fans faced hours-long virtual queues and tried a range of strategies as second tranche of Eras tour presale tickets went on sale

Taylor Swift has broken a national record with more than 4 million users vying to gain access on Wednesday to highly coveted presale tickets to her Sydney and Melbourne shows.

The second round of tickets went live for Swift’s three Sydney shows at 10am, amid unprecedented demand. By 1.43pm, all general Frontier presale tickets for Sydney had sold out, Ticketek Australia said in a tweet.

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Sorry, Swifties: BTS revealed as authors of mystery book that intrigued the internet

Beyond the Story: 10-Year Record of BTS will be out on 9 July, ending feverish speculation that the previously untitled book was a Taylor Swift memoir

The guessing game began this week when a mysteriously untitled book, scheduled for publication in July and known only as “4C Untitled Flatiron Nonfiction Summer 2023”, appeared. It quickly became a bestseller when Taylor Swift fans began feverishly speculating that it was her surprise memoir.

But the mystery has been solved, with publishing house Flatiron Books bringing forward their announcement by a month to reveal the book is actually by another musical powerhouse: the K-pop boyband BTS.

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UK’s top 10 singles of 2022 were all by British artists

A clean sweep led by Harry Styles was an ‘astonishing’ high note for the music industry – but the domination of older songs reflected the impact of streaming

For the first time since year-end charts were introduced more than 50 years ago, British artists have made up the entirety of the year’s 10 most popular songs in the UK.

Topping the biggest songs of 2022 in the UK was Harry Styles’ omnipresent As It Was; Ed Sheeran had two songs on the list, while new artists such as south London songwriter Cat Burns and Scottish dance duo LF System rubbed shoulders with Kate Bush, whose 1985 single Running Up That Hill topped the UK singles chart for the first time last year after being featured in the latest series of Netflix drama Stranger Things, having originally peaked at No 3.

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Taylor Swift fans sue Ticketmaster over tour sale debacle

Lawsuit claims ‘millions of fans waited up to eight hours and were unable to purchase tickets as a result of insufficient ticket releases’

A group of Taylor Swift fans is suing Ticketmaster over what they call the “disastrous” recent debacle to secure tickets for her 2023 Eras US tour.

In November, Ticketmaster had to cancel the public on-sale date for the tour “due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand”, the company said at the time.

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Ticketmaster’s Taylor Swift chaos triggers US Senate antitrust hearing

Several politicians voice concerns about dominance of ticket sales company after botched release for singer’s tour

A US Senate antitrust panel will go ahead with a hearing on the lack of competition in the country’s ticketing industry after Ticketmaster’s problems last week managing the sale of Taylor Swift tickets.

Tickemaster’s parent company, Live Nation, has blamed presale problems for Swift’s Eras tour – the pop superstar’s first US tour in five years – on “unprecedented demand” and an effort to keep out bots run by ticket scalpers.

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Tennessee attorney general investigates Ticketmaster over Taylor Swift presale

Jonathan Skrmetti’s office looking into complaints after site crashed and resale tickets listed for up to $20,000

Tennessee’s attorney general said he was launching a consumer protection investigation into Ticketmaster after his office was inundated with complaints from Taylor Swift fans trying to get tickets to her 2023 concert tour.

Jonathan Skrmetti, the state’s attorney general, said at a press conference on Wednesday that while no direct allegations of misconduct have been made against Ticketmaster, his office will look into the complaints made about the company.

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Taylor Swift becomes first musician to claim entire Top 10 on Billboard Hot 100

Singer has surpassed Drake, who had held the previous record with nine of the top songs for a week last year

Taylor Swift scored a 10 out of 10 to become the first artist in history to claim the Top 10 slots on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the US, with tracks from her latest album, Midnights.

Billboard reported on Monday that Swift has surpassed Drake, who had held the previous record with nine of the Top 10 songs for a week in September 2021.

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MTV VMAs 2022: Taylor Swift wins and Johnny Depp surprises in chaotic ceremony

Taylor Swift announced a new album, Nicki Minaj shouted out female genitals and Johnny Depp made a surprise appearance in a strange, profane evening

Taylor Swift took home the night’s biggest prize – and announced a new album – during the 2022 MTV Video Music Awards, a chaotic, bleep-heavy show that nodded to music phenomena past and present, and featured a surprise appearance by Johnny Depp.

Swift, who won best longform video and video of the year for All Too Well (10 Minute Version) for her 2021 re-recorded album Red, was the only artist to double-up on televised awards. Across three hours, MTV moonmen statues went to industry veterans such as Nicki Minaj (best hip-hop) and the Red Hot Chili Peppers (best rock); non-English superstars such as Puerto Rican singer Bad Bunny (artist of the year) and Blackpink’s Lisa (best K-pop); and newer faces Jack Harlow (song of summer), Lil Nas X (best collaboration, with Harlow, for Industry Baby) and Dove Cameron, a former Disney child star turned actor, who surprised some to win best new artist.

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