Taylor Swift

Born in 1989 in Pennsylvania, she moved to Nashville as a teenager and broke through writing her own country songs at an age when most artists are still being handed them. Across a decade she shed the genre entirely, becoming the defining pop songwriter of her generation — confessional, specific, ruthlessly catchy. When a dispute cost her the master recordings of her early albums, she responded by re-recording them from scratch as “Taylor's Version,” a move that doubled as art, accounting, and a lesson in leverage the rest of the industry took notes on. Her record-breaking stadium tours have t…