Taylor Swift Named Best New Artist of Year By iTunes
Taylor Swift, the first bonafide Country star of the MySpace generation, reached another digital milestone this week when her hit single “Teardrops On My Guitar” was lauded by iTunes as their #1 selling country song for 2007. In addition, iTunes has released their Best of 2007 Editor’s Choice lists, naming Taylor as Best New Artist. Taylor, who celebrated her 18th birthday just last week, is consistently the most popular Country artist on MySpace, averaging 100,000 music streams a day on the site. Her total MySpace streams have surpassed 31 million.
This week also marked Taylor’s biggest sales week to date at retail, with fans showing their support for Taylor at the cash registers by snapping up an incredible 98,820 copies of her debut CD this week alone. This week Taylor Swift ranks at # 4 on the Billboard Country Albums chart and at # 9 on Billboard’s all-genre Top 200 Albums chart, an incredible feat considering that her CD is now 59 weeks old. Rounding out Country’s Top 5 albums are the new releases from The Eagles (6 weeks old), Carrie Underwood (7 weeks old), Garth Brooks (5 weeks old), and Rascal Flatts (12 weeks old.)
Taylor’s current single, “Our Song,” which she wrote by herself, is in its second week at #1 on the Country radio charts and in its 4th week in the # 1 position atop the CMT video chart. Taylor is now the youngest person to single-handedly write and sing a # 1 country single entirely on her own.