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Taylor Swift during her Eras World Tour (Photo by DAVID GRAY/AFP via Getty Images)

The data doesn’t lie: Taylor Swift is the biggest pop star on the planet

Tom Jones, David Crowther

The Tortured Chartmakers Department

Another day, another piece about Taylor Swift’s continued dominance: the songstress’s latest effort, The Tortured Poets Department, was released today and (surprise!) it’s a double album, meaning twice as many songs to rack up mind-boggling numbers and break streaming records all over the world.

The cold hard data doesn’t lie: Taylor Swift is the biggest popstar on the planet… and that’s before TTPD was released. We’ve plotted the 100 biggest stars on Spotify, and, while The Weeknd technically reaches a slightly broader audience — with 113m monthly listeners to Swift’s 98m — Swifties are hitting that replay button much more frequently.

The star, whose billion-dollar Eras Tour is not only the top-earning tour ever, but also the highest-grossing concert film of all time, was clocking more daily streams than any other artist earlier this week, with megahits like Blank Space, Cruel Summer, and Anti-Hero all contributing to her 75 million+ plays a day.

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Press Gazette just published its annual look at the biggest news sites in the world across all languages; for the most part, it doesn’t make for particularly pretty reading.

The journalism industry publication’s latest update, which is based on estimates provided by Similarweb for May, found that 37 of the world’s 50 most visited news sites saw their reach shrink. Press Gazette highlighted that American outlets have been hit particularly hard by declining Google traffic compared to European counterparts, owing to the platform’s AI features rolling out earlier in the US.

Even the BBC, having climbed the rankings from last year to top the 2026 chart — reportedly in part thanks to Similarweb’s decision to combine the “.co.uk” and “.com” versions of the URL, given that the sites redirect to each other depending on the user’s location — showed a 1.9% decline from last year.

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