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    Taylor Swift Has the Most Weeks at No. 1 on the Album Chart

    The latest success of “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” gives Swift 68 weeks atop the Billboard 200, surpassing Elvis Presley’s record.Given how much Taylor Swift dominated music and pop culture in 2023, it’s only appropriate that the year’s album chart ended with Swift on top.“1989 (Taylor’s Version),” the star’s remake of her pop crossover hit from 2014, led the Billboard 200 for the last two weeks of the year, notching the album’s fourth and fifth times at the top and helping Swift break yet another record.With the latest chart, Swift has now earned a total of 68 times at No. 1, over 13 of her LPs, which surpasses Elvis Presley for the most appearances in the top slot for a solo artist. Of all acts, only the Beatles have been at No. 1 more times — 132 — in the history of Billboard’s flagship album chart, which dates to 1956.In its latest week out, “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” had the equivalent of 98,000 sales in the United States, including 48.5 million streams and 61,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate. In the nine weeks since the new “1989” was released in late October, it has had the equivalent of 2.8 million sales and just over one billion streams in the United States alone.Half of the latest Top 10 is occupied by seasonal albums, led by Michael Bublé’s “Christmas” at No. 2. The others are Nat King Cole’s “The Christmas Song” (No. 4), “A Christmas Gift for You From Phil Spector” (No. 7), Mariah Carey’s “Merry Christmas” (No. 8) and Pentatonix’s “The Greatest Christmas Hits” (No. 10). Those titles are likely to plunge down next week’s chart, if not vanish from it entirely, as listeners tend to pack up their holiday streaming playlists with the ornaments and wrapping paper on Dec. 26.Also this week, Nicki Minaj’s “Pink Friday 2” is No. 3 and Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” holds at No. 5. More

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    The Managers Who Helped Make Travis Kelce a Celebrity

    In the only recent year in which Travis Kelce and the Kansas City Chiefs weren’t playing in the Super Bowl, the N.F.L. star was driving around Los Angeles in early February with his business managers, André and Aaron Eanes, marveling at billboards featuring Dwayne Johnson, the actor and entertainer better known as the Rock.“Man, I don’t think I’ll ever be as famous as the Rock,” Mr. Kelce said.His co-managers looked at each other. “We’re like, Yes, you can,” André Eanes said.The twin brothers had known since Mr. Kelce was at the University of Cincinnati that the 6-foot-5 athletic star with the Marvel-character physique, blue eyes and affable charm had crossover potential.But let’s be honest. Nobody imagined this.This was a year even The Rock might envy. Mr. Kelce, a tight end, won the Super Bowl (his second) in February. In March, he hosted “Saturday Night Live.” He’s starred in seven national television commercials. The podcast he co-hosts with his brother, Jason, is among the most popular on Spotify. He launched a clothing line with his team.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    The Beatles, Taylor Swift and More Pop Stars Mess With the Past

    Who says hindsight is 20/20?Musicians keep getting tempted to revisit recordings they made long ago, and in 2023, flashbacks from the Beatles and Taylor Swift drew worldwide attention. Some temptations are technological; others have business imperatives. Wielding the latest digital tools, some powered by artificial intelligence, musicians and labels have been busily exploring their vaults and hard drives, many of them thoroughly convinced that they now have a better idea of how their older music is supposed to sound. Do they?Recorded music is many things: an expression, a structure, a physical performance, a series of decisions large and small, an artifact of memory and emotion, a souvenir of a particular time. But all of those aspects end up as a waveform, which can then be treated like any other information. The digital era and its computer-engineering paradigms have made that information infinitely malleable: just a starting point for version 2.0, 3.0 and beyond. A.I. is only going to make things more complicated as it reconfigures all the information available online.But with music, an update isn’t necessarily an improvement. It might be an anachronism or a betrayal instead.One of the hardest decisions for any artist is knowing when something is finished. That choice might be made after endless deliberation, on a deadline, on a whim, under the influence — who knows? In the vinyl era, that decision was usually final, give or take alternate mixes for singles, radio and clubs. Listeners reacted to, and bonded with, the music in its fixed form.Digital loosened things up — at first out of necessity, as vast analog catalogs were transferred to new formats, and then more innovatively, as musicians reveled in the possibilities of vastly expanded multitracking, sampling, editing and even glitching. Remixes, remasters, mash-ups, ghost duets — all kinds of second-guessing ensued, including among musicians themselves who were older but not necessarily wiser as artists. In the streaming era, even an official release date doesn’t make things final; Kanye West, now Ye, kept revising his 2016 LP “The Life of Pablo” — making previous iterations vanish online — well after its initial release.There are obvious commercial incentives for looking back. For many artists, as well as their marketers, it’s easier creative work to revisit sure things than to forge brand-new material. And there’s hardly a more time-tested selling point than claiming that a well-loved product is new and improved.Pop has been busily plumbing its archives since the dawn of the digital era, but 2023 brought some high-profile time-warping. The Beatles empire heralded the release of “Now and Then,” which is billed as the last song that all four members worked on, even asynchronously. It’s built from a John Lennon demo from the late 1970s that the other three Beatles started rearranging in the 1990s. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr did recording sessions to complete the track in 2022, using recent software that could cleanly separate out Lennon’s vocal.The surviving Beatles tidied up the song, strengthening the beat and jettisoning some of Lennon’s more self-doubting lyrics and lacing it with elements (like vocal harmonies) lifted from other Beatles songs. They were deliberately looking back where the Beatles of the 1960s had determinedly pushed ahead. It’s a 21st-century song, as much “now” as “then.”“Now and Then” arrived as part of the latest Beatles reissues: new, expanded, remixed versions of the anthologies known as the Red and Blue albums, “The Beatles/1962-1966” and “The Beatles/1966-1970” (now also designated “The 2023 Edition”). They are the continuation of the Beatles’ longtime efforts to wring every possible product out of their catalog: concept compilations (“Love Songs,” No. 1 hits on “1”), expanded — and illuminating — reissues that include unreleased session tapes, a “naked” mix of “Let It Be,” a megamix for Cirque du Soleil (“Love”).The Red and Blue albums, originally released in 1973, were many young listeners’ primers on the Beatles: a whirlwind career ruthlessly pared down to what two LPs could hold. The 2023 editions have more songs; they’re now three-LP sets, diluting the canon established by the original compilations. And as with the other painstakingly reworked 21st-century Beatles releases, they fidget with countless sonic details: panning instruments to different places or moving them into the center, separating parts that had been blurred or blended, bringing out new details, crisping things up.The new mixes offer a contemporary mixture of analytical clarity and arbitrary tweaks. But they don’t entirely trust that the groundbreaking 1960s Beatles already knew what they were doing in the first place — and that their artistic achievement was shaped by how the Beatles dealt with the era’s studio technology, limitations and all. People encountering the songs on streaming services may not notice which version they’re getting: the ones all the Beatles chose to release, or the new ones.A different kind of reclamation project continued when Taylor Swift released “1989 (Taylor’s Version),” her remake and expansion of her breakthrough pop album from 2014: nearly note-for-note reconstructions of the previously released songs, plus five other songs “from the vault” that she has said didn’t fit the original album. Swift has impeccable personal reasons for the do-over; she does not own the master recordings she made for the Big Machine label, even though the songs are hers. Meanwhile, her latest fans get a chance to experience a “new” Swift album as though it were being released for the first time.Yet an unimpeachable business statement is different from an artistic one. On “1989” — with the Swedish pop master Max Martin as executive producer — Swift was boldly and indelibly redefining herself. She left behind the country radio format, cranked up the beats and loops and honed her pop concision. The album has a spirit of both discipline and discovery, of kicking old expectations to the curb while flexing new skills.And that’s something the remake can’t recapture. Instead of a breakthrough, it’s more like an assignment or an exercise, diligently revisiting every instrumental layer and vocal inflection. It’s thoroughly, unblinkingly professional, but the stakes are lower. Time-warp paradoxes start with the first track, “Welcome to New York.” Swift sings, “Everybody here wanted something more/Searching for a sound they hadn’t heard before” — as she rebuilds a sound the entire world has now heard before.Of course, there’s an outlier and counterexample — as always in music — to leaving the past alone. In 2023, the Replacements released “Tim: Let It Bleed Edition,” a boxed set including a full-length remix of the band’s 1985 album “Tim” by the longtime producer and engineer Ed Stasium.“Tim” was the Replacements’ fourth album but its first on a major label, at a time when “indie credibility” seemed to matter. That identity crisis was central to the songs Paul Westerberg wrote: “God what a mess/On the ladder of success,” he sang in “Bastards of Young.”“Tim” was produced by Tom Erdelyi of the Ramones, who made it unfriendly to radio play; it’s distant, muted and unnecessarily murky, perhaps to resist any accusations that the Replacements were selling out. Stasium’s remix brings out all kinds of things that were recorded but downplayed in the original production: snappy but untamed drumming, guitars that wrangle and cackle, Westerberg’s heartfelt and rowdy vocals.Even with this mix, “Tim” probably wouldn’t have been an album-radio hit; the band was still too scrappy for mid-1980s gatekeepers. But the remixed “Tim” is the rare case where second thoughts can change things for the better. On streaming services and in the box, the Replacements don’t hide their earlier choices; the past and present versions of the album are both included. At least we can still know which is which.Digital possibilities are only going to scramble things further, untethering artistic products from their original inspirations and proportions. Oil paintings are being remarketed as environments. Albums are getting a new round of spatialized Dolby Atmos remixes. A.I. will be generating countless variations, pastiches and fakes. But amid the flood of new versions, let’s not forget to identify, recognize and celebrate the originals. More

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    Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and the Sphere: The Year in Live Music

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicThree years after the pandemic brought live music to a halt, the touring business is thriving: 2023 brought in record revenue — over $9 billion — thanks in part to major outings by Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, and in part to increased prices across the board. Live shows are also becoming more ambitious in scale and filigree, underscoring how big concerts are becoming experiential luxury goods.But even though the live music space is thriving, there is still persistent growling about Ticketmaster and its fee structure, and also about rising prices in general. Social media amplified both the thrills of some live events, and also confusion over cratering ticket process for others, like some recent dates on Travis Scott’s tour.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about why this year was such an impressive one for the touring business, what lessons established acts are learning from younger arena and stadium stars, and whether the continued pressure on ticket price is sustainable in the long run.Guest:Ben Sisario, The New York Times’s music business reporterConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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    Bad Blood: A Timeline of the Taylor Swift-Kanye West-Kim Kardashian Feud

    After 14 years, a new interview suggests this dispute may keep giving us new chapters.Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. Optimus Prime and Megatron.And Taylor Swift and Kanye West.Feuds don’t get more colossal than the one between two of the biggest stars in music. (And the reality TV star Kim Kardashian, who was married to West for a time, has been involved too.) There has been a leaked tape, diss tracks and videos, and a naked wax figure. The latest salvo came in Swift’s interview with Time magazine after the publication chose her as Person of the Year.The story has bubbled up even more as fans await the expected rerelease of Swift’s album “Reputation,” which was particularly focused on the dispute.Here’s the decade-long story of how the feud has progressed.Sept. 13, 2009West interrupts Swift.West interrupts Swift as she accepts the award for best female video at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2009.Jason Decrow/Associated PressThe incident that started it all. Swift, 19, goes onstage at Radio City Music Hall to accept the MTV Video Music Award for best female video for “You Belong With Me,” after defeating Beyoncé, among others.She has barely said thank you when West, 32, bum rushes the stage, takes her microphone and declares: “I’m really happy for you; I’m going to let you finish. But Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    Golden Globes 2024 Snubs and Surprises: ‘Past Lives,’ Taylor Swift and More

    The Korean American drama from Celine Song got four nominations, while Swift’s concert film got one. “The Color Purple” was overlooked for best musical.The nominations for the 81st Golden Globes, announced Monday morning, brought good tidings for box-office titans “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer,” though some of the other contenders hoping to break through were dealt an early setback.This year, any discussion of Golden Globe snubs and surprises ought to start with the show itself, since this once-snubbed awards ceremony has engineered a surprising comeback.NBC dropped the 2022 edition of the show after a host of scandals involving the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the group that voted for the Golden Globes, prompted an A-list boycott. Pilloried for its lack of Black members, the H.F.P.A. resolved to clean up its act and diversify its membership. And the 2023 ceremony, hosted by Jerrod Carmichael, managed to attract a respectable guest list. (Though the eventual Oscar winner Brendan Fraser, who accused the former H.F.P.A. head Philip Berk of groping him in 2003, was a notable no-show. Berk denied the accusation.)In June, the H.F.P.A. was formally dissolved when the Golden Globes brand was bought by Eldridge Industries and Dick Clark Productions (which is part of Penske Media, owner of many Hollywood trade publications), and the remaining voting body was further reshuffled. Once an eccentric, cloistered membership of about 85 voters, it has swelled to about 300 even as some of its longest-serving and more problematic voters were expelled. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    Taylor Swift Is Time’s Person of the Year

    The magazine chose the pop star over finalists that included the Hollywood strikers, Barbie and King Charles III. Time magazine on Wednesday named Taylor Swift as its person of the year. “Picking one person who represents the eight billion people on the planet is no easy task. We picked a choice that represents joy. Someone who’s bringing light to the world,” said Sam Jacobs, the magazine’s editor in chief, on NBC’s “Today” program on Wednesday morning. “She was like weather, she was everywhere.”Swift beat out eight other finalists who were announced on “Today” this week, including King Charles III and Barbie. “Swift’s accomplishments as an artist — culturally, critically, and commercially — are so legion that to recount them seems almost beside the point,” the magazine wrote.Swift grabbed many headlines in 2023, in part spurred by her immensely popular Eras Tour that proved too much for Ticketmaster to handle, the release of the rerecording of her 2014 album “1989” that broke sales records and her relationship with the Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. Swift has also become the subject of academic and (even more) journalistic interest: Harvard University will offer a “Taylor Swift and Her World” class, and Gannett, the largest newspaper chain in the United States, appointed a special reporter to cover nothing but Swift.Time awards the title to “the individual, group, or concept that has had the most influence on the world throughout the previous 12 months.” Launched as a marketing gimmick in the 1920s, the award has continued to drive fanfare as weekly print magazines struggle to remain relevant.Swift beat out eight other finalists to receive the honor.Inez and Vinoodh for Time, via, via ReutersThe past few yearsLast year, when Russia invaded Ukraine, the magazine awarded the distinction to Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, and the “spirit of Ukraine.” The magazine named Elon Musk person of the year in 2021. “With a flick of his finger, the stock market soars or swoons,” the magazine wrote at the time. In 2020, Joseph R. Biden and Kamala Harris — then the president-elect and vice president-elect — were on the cover, and in 2019 it was the climate activist Greta Thunberg.In 2018, the title went to Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, and other journalists. The previous year, the title went to “the silence breakers,” women who stepped forward to accuse powerful men of sexual harassment and assault. And in 2016 it was President-elect Donald J. Trump, whom the magazine called the “president of the divided states of America.”Historical choicesThe persons of the year have not always been without controversy. In 1938 Time chose Adolf Hitler, and the magazine gave the dubious honor to Josef Stalin twice, in 1939 and in 1942.In 1972, the magazine chose the “improbable partnership” of President Richard M. Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger.Other times, the magazine chose regular citizens. In 1969, Time gave the distinction to “The Middle Americans,” celebrating them for continuing to pray in public schools in defiance of the United States Supreme Court.Nearly 40 years later, the magazine plastered a mirror on the cover of the magazine and named “You” its person of the year for 2006. And in other instances, it wasn’t a person at all. In 1982, there was a “machine of the year”: the computer.Victor Mather More