Taylor Swift Wins Prestigious Award, Overcomes Struggles

About every ten years, the American Music Awards gives out an Artist of the Decade award to one artist. This decade, the artist was chosen to be Taylor Swift. Swift was recognized for this achievement during the 2019 American Music Awards, held on November 24. She was already in competition for five other awards, including Artist of the Year, Best Pop/Rock album for her album “Lover”, Favorite Pop/Rock Female.  

Swift moved to Nashville when she was 14 years old, and released her first album on October 24, 2006, called Taylor Swift. Since then, she has released six more studio albums: Fearless, Speak Now, Red, 1989, Reputation, and her most recent, Lover. Throughout her career, she had five songs reach No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart. Swift has gone on many successful world tours, received countless awards, and even became the youngest person to make Time’s list of the top 100 most powerful women in 2015.  

As a tribute to her highly accomplished career, Swift had the plan of performing her older songs for her performance at the AMAs. However, getting those songs to the stage was not easy. In June 2019, former label manager Scooter Braun was granted rights of all of Swift’s songs released prior to leaving Big Machine Group in 2018. Furthermore, in November, Swift revealed that she was unable to perform her old songs, as that would have allegedly been considered re-recording her songs, according to Braun and Scott Borchetta, something she intended to do in November 2020.  

The controversy caused major backlash against Big Machine, and the label headquarters in Nashville were forced to shut down on November 15 at 12:30 P.M. Following the shutdown, Swift was given permission to perform her old songs at the AMAs. In addition to performing at the AMAs, Swift also won six awards that night, including Artist of the Year, Video of the Year, Pop/Rock Album of the Year, and—of course—Artist of the Decade. Following these wins Swift has also become the most awarded artist at the AMAs with 28 total awards, surpassing Michael Jackson’s 24 total awards at the annual event.