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Swift had four of the top 10 most-consumed albums in the U.S., while a whopping 30 country songs made the year-end Hot 100

Let’s get this out of the way: Taylor Swift dominated the year in music, and it wasn’t even close. Four-year-old songs of hers topped the charts. She sold physical albums at a head-spinning rate. Her Eras Tour was an economic stimulus in every city she played, and reignited conversations around the deeply broken ticketing marketplace as fans scrambled to purchase tickets. Her relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce created a frenzy around a celebrity simply attending NFL games. And she also released some damn great music. By any metric, 2023 was one of the most impressive years of all time for a singular pop star, and even that understates how huge the year was for Swift. But her transcendent 2023 was just one of several key trends that defined the last 365 days. Here’s the year in music, by the numbers. Taylor Swift Owned the Music World on Stage and on Record The Eras Tour became the highest-grossing concert tour ever in just eight months, and it grossed more than the next two biggest tours — Beyoncé’s and Bruce Springsteen’s — combined. It was also the first to surpass $1 billion in ticket sales, according to data from Pollstar . Per the concert trade publication, Swift made $200 million in merchandise sales at her tour stops, too — double her global Spotify earnings for the streams of her catalog. With more than 26.1 billion global streams on Spotify, the most Spotify has ever reported for a year end streaming leader, the platform paid out over $100 million for Swift’s catalog this year. Credit that to Swift having four of the top 10 most-consumed albums in the U.S., according to data from Luminate. Her 2022 LP Midnights came in at second, only behind Morgan Wallen’s One Thing at a Time , while 1989 (Taylor’s Version) was fourth, Lover was sixth, and Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) took eighth. Swift also accounted for eight of the top 25 best-performing albums in the U.S. this year, according to Luminate data. Editor’s picks The 250 Greatest Guitarists of All Time The 100 Best Albums of 2023 The 50 Worst Decisions in Movie History All 243 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked While Swift commands strong streaming numbers, what distinguishes her from her peers is how she’s kept fans buying her albums even as traditional sales have fallen heavily since she first broke through in the industry in 2006. That can be attributed, in part, to her knack for turning physical albums into collectable items: As Billboard reported last year, she listed over 20 different physical versions of Midnights . Earlier this year, she included over a dozen options for physical versions of 1989 (Taylor’s Version). That album marked the first time one of her re-recorded albums outsold the original version in its debut week. When comparing Luminate’s top 200 albums of 2023, Swift accounted for nearly three out of every 10 album sales. With 11 different albums in the top 200, those LPs amounted to about 4.8 million physical and digital sales. The rest of the top 200, excluding Swift, combined for about 11.2 million units. Swift’s albums took up five of the top 10 slots on Luminate’s year-to-date Top 100 Vinyl chart. With 11 of her albums on the chart totaling over 2.8 million sales this year, she makes up about 28 percent of all vinyl sales on the chart. The hype around Swift’s “Taylor’s Version” re-releases along with her massive Eras Tour boosted the rest of her catalog as well. Reputation, for example, jumped from 118 on last year’s year-end chart all the way to 21 this year. Going into 2024, a story to watch is how Reputation’s “Taylor’s Version” will compare to the original — assuming the re-release comes out next year, as many Swifties are expecting. “Cruel Summer,” meanwhile finally topped the Hot 100 more than four years after its release, enjoying a resurgence as the Eras Tour took over the country. Related Taylor Swift Fan at Brazil Concert Died of Heat Exhaustion Jack Antonoff Explains Why His Music With Taylor Swift and Lana Del Rey is Getting 'Loonier' — In a Good Way ‘Bluey’ Is Not Just for Kids — Here’s How to Watch the Series Online Country’s Streaming Revolution Is Finally Here Country music boomed in 2023, thanks to two very distinct trends. On one end, culture war songs like Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town” and Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” hit the top of the Billboard Hot 100 when fans, many of them right-wing, bought the songs in droves on the iTunes chart. While digital song sales make up a tiny percentage of all song consumption today, they can play an outsized role in driving tracks up the charts since a sale is worth considerably more than a stream when it comes to chart weighting metrics. But anomalies like Aldean and Anthony serve as more of a distraction from what actually happened in the country music business this year. Country’s landmark 2023 was driven much more so by a major surge in streaming, thanks to heavy hitters including Morgan Wallen, Luke Combs, Jelly Ro Read more