Taylor Swift is just super popular at this moment. The unprecedented units generated match the unprecedented demand she is seeing.

You’re the one who set the snotty tone after I asked a simple question. If you don’t want a rude response don’t be rude yourself.

There didn’t need to be this much drama under a curiosity I had.

Yes, extremely impressive, not just due to their limited discography, but also given how faceless and under the radar they've always been to the mainstream. I'd say their name, their image and their music, is probably the most unknown to the general public of all the mega selling, premier division acts.

Is it a glitch or why did her units decrease from yesterday? Yesterday she had about 167,500,000 EAS and now 167,231,000 EAS

The Rihanna comparisons in the biography remaining after years and years of updates feels quite dated and unnecessary. I understand drawing comparisons for context but it feels more heavy handed in this article than it does in other ones as well. I would consider a rewrite in the next update to put more focus on the actual artist being discussed than so much space dedicated to someone else entirely.

It looks like Taylor may end up overtaking Madonna as the most successful female artist ever. Anyway to calculate how long that would take based on the current performance of her catalogue on streaming platforms?

I guess it's a lot to do with my age but even though she may well pass her, Madonna at her height seemed so much bigger than Taylor has ever been. I'm not saying more successful per se but just bigger in the sense of more well known, more famous, with her songs seeming to sink through to a much deeper and wider demographic.

I guess that could be something to do with how limited music promotion and broadcasting was back then. In the UK, there were relatively few TV stations or Radio stations and these were pretty much the only outlets for hearing contemporary music, so people of all ages tuned into say BBC1 or Radio 1, whereas now you have a plethora of different avenues and way more genre etc specific stations, channels etc, so everything in a way has become more diluted and doesn't capture as many of the public in one fell swoop.

I agree with you actually.

Regarding Taylor's popularity, I have to admit that if you told me two years ago that Taylor could possibly overtake Madonna, I would have laughed. But Midnights seems to be her Ray of Light moment just when it seemed her popularity was waning.

The problem though with measuring the success of these two artists is, their success is based on two completely different methods of consumption. Although this site tries to find a common ground, it will never be like measuring say Queen's physical sales against Madonnas or the Stones, because we arent measuring like against like any more.

Very true. I think it's a grey area because it (meaning streaming) seems to have taken the place that physical media (CDs, vinyl, cassette, etc.) AND the radio used to play in the 20th century. Back then, you heard a song on the radio and if you really liked it, you'd go out and buy the album/song which represented a committment from the buyer. Streaming doesn't completely translate to this since it also serves as a "radio" with tons of playlists. I guess maybe an equivalent metric would be how many times a specific consumer listens to the same album/song on repeat. But even then, it's iffy.

I suppose the steaming equivalent back in the physical era would have been, once someone got an album home, which tracks they played and how often, which was obviously completely impossible to do.

For me I struggle to find an equivalence between physical consumption and streaming consumption and personally feel the two should never have been merged, it all just feels a bit too contrived for me and trying to push square pegs into round holes. I'd have much preferred that physical sales were just left as they were (I didn't even like downloads being added to them) and streaming measurement given its own distinct measurement from scratch.

Have you been paying attention to the news and hysteria that follows Taylor? Rarely has someone had such cultural domination. You say she seemed bigger, but have you ever thought why? There was a distinct musical culture back then, that really allowed only white anglo artists to sell big globally in a largely Western world. Part of why Taylor's success is so insane is how globaly she is, how she has been so seamlessly able to penetrate and dominate Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore, China, etc. That is an entire scope of domination that gets lost to you because of your Western perspective. The market like you stated is entirely different, as is consumption, but that doesn't mean Madonna was acting in some far fetched heights of fame Taylor couldn't dream of. She wasn't.

Maybe Madonna was so popular because she was able to thrive in a limited scope of what the public was fed via the media. Wouldn't that mean with all the noise and outlets and the bombardment of information and media available, Taylor's domination is more impressive than Madonnas?

What is wrong with you? It's just always the same angry, defensive, pro Taylor, anti everything else, crap every time you post. Always excuses etc and looking at it from one angle, the angle that bigs up Taylor and takes down everything else. It really is very tiresome, having to read your biased, unobjective, angry and bitter sounding posts.

I met multiple people saying they're sick of Taylor precisely because how famous and constantly talked about she is, she literally took a break from the limelight after 2015 because of this... Martin is also British and Madonna was insanely successful there, much more than in the US.

Imagine how we feel about you on the Taylor thread all the time saying the exact same things.

You're only saying this because you've latched onto your own mindset and you yourself are always making the same angry, combative, anti-taylor, pro-anybody but 'crap'.

It's very tiresome having to read YOUR biased, unobjective, angry, and bitter sounding posts.