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      Taylor Swift and Beyoncé Avoided a Collision on the Charts. (Again.)

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      Pop’s two reigning queens are often cast as rivals, but they have continually supported each other — and spaced out their album releases.In February, Taylor Swift took the stage at the Grammy Awards to accept the prize for best pop vocal album. After dutifully thanking the Recording Academy and her fans, she got down to business: “My brand-new album comes out April 19,” she said, in a surprise announcement revealing “The Tortured Poets Department.” It was a heads up for her loyal followers, as well as anyone else in the business with a spring release on the radar: If you want your new album to debut at No. 1, don’t release it on April 19. Or April 26. Or May 3, for that matter.A week later, following a teaser during a Super Bowl commercial, Beyoncé also dropped news of a new album: “Cowboy Carter” would arrive earlier than “Poets,” with breathing room, on March 29. Another pop powerhouse in the Grammy audience made her own announcement in early April: Billie Eilish will unveil her forthcoming third album, “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” a month after Swift’s release, on May 17.Beyoncé and Swift, the 21st century’s pre-eminent pop stars, have often been cast as competitors if not rivals, a story line partly rooted in misogyny and amplified by dueling fan armies filled with stans, or superfans.For their part, the two artists have regularly dispelled the notion over the years. They were first linked, through no fault of their own, at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, when Kanye West interrupted a Swift acceptance speech to advocate for her fellow nominee Beyoncé; later that night, Beyoncé brought Swift onstage to finish her remarks. In 2021, Swift shared on Instagram that Beyoncé had sent her congratulatory flowers after Swift won the album of the year Grammy for “Folklore,” calling Beyoncé “the queen of grace & greatness.” And last year, following their blockbuster stadium tours, they appeared at each other’s concert film premieres, a pointed rebuke to message-board zealots looking to sow discord.“Clearly, it’s very lucrative for the media and stan culture to pit two women against each other, even when the two artists in question refuse to participate in that discussion,” Swift told Time magazine. (Representatives for Swift and Beyoncé declined to comment.)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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      They Loved Taylor Swift. They Loved Football. Then Their Worlds Collided.

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      The Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce romance has brought together two of the internet’s most engaged fan bases. What happens when you’re already in both?Emily Calhoun remembers the moment she realized her worlds were colliding. It was in the early days of the 2023 N.F.L. season, and suddenly her phone was buzzing nonstop.“Twelve people called me,” she said. “‘Are you seeing this?!’”Ms. Calhoun, who was raised on Denver Broncos football, sure was. It was impossible to miss the seismic overlap. Her love of football was fusing with her fandom of another pop culture phenomenon: a onetime country singer whom Ms. Calhoun, 38, had come to love in the early 2000s.We’re talking, of course, about one of the most consequential mergers of our time, one that united two of the world’s most rabid fan bases in unholy internet matrimony: Taylor Swift and the N.F.L., via her boyfriend, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce.For the sliver of fans like Ms. Calhoun, it’s been a joyful, and complicated, overlap of identities and algorithms. They have been in fantasy drafts and in the Ticketmaster queues. They’re in the same stadiums for the Eras Tour as they are on a Sunday in September. They’re probably even in your football groupchats, the middle section of the Venn diagram that has animated American sports for the last year: Swifties who grew up football die-hards.“It was like two elemental forces that shouldn’t be allowed to touch,” Prof. Galen Clavio, who studies sports and social media at Indiana University, said of the collision.In the months since the Swift-Kelce relationship started, a considerable amount of ink has been spilled on the dynamics of their romance. There was the outrage over the pop star supposedly usurping substantial camera time during N.F.L. broadcasts (she really wasn’t), the navel-gazing over whether the relationship was a publicity stunt, and then, finally, the spiral into conspiracy, with some right-wing commenters speculating that the relationship was somehow a scheme to support President Biden in the 2024 election. 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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Audience Snapshot: Four Years After Shutdown, a Mixed Recovery

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      Covid brought live performance to a halt. Now the audience for pop concerts and sporting events has roared back, while attendance on Broadway and at some major museums is still down.It was four years ago — on March 12, 2020 — that the coronavirus brought the curtain down on Broadway for what was initially supposed to be a monthlong shutdown, but which wound up lasting a year and a half.The pandemic brought live events and big gatherings to a halt, silencing orchestras, shutting museums and movie theaters and leaving sports teams playing to empty stadiums dotted with cardboard cutouts.Now, four years later, audiences are coming back, but the recovery has been uneven. Here is a snapshot of where things stand now:Broadway audiences are still down 17 percent from prepandemic levels.On Broadway, overall attendance is still down about 17 percent: 9.3 million seats have been filled in the current season as of March 3, down from 11.1 million at the same point in 2020. Box office grosses are down, too: Broadway shows have grossed $1.2 billion so far this season, 14 percent below the level in early March of 2020.Broadway has always had more flops than successes, and the post-pandemic period has been challenging for producers and investors, especially those involved in new musicals. Three pop productions that have opened since the pandemic — “Six,” about the wives of King Henry VIII, “MJ,” about Michael Jackson and “& Juliet,” which imagines an alternate history for Shakespeare’s tragic heroine — are ongoing hits, but far more musicals have flamed out. The industry is looking with some trepidation toward next month, when a large crop of new shows is set to open.Many nonprofit theaters around the country are also struggling — attracting fewer subscribers and producing fewer shows — and some have closed. One bright spot has been the touring Broadway market, which has been booming.— More

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      Sydney Asbestos Problem Grows as Taylor Swift Venue Tests Negative

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      Officials have found the toxic mineral at 34 sites, including schools and parks. The grounds outside a Taylor Swift concert venue tested negative.Officials in Sydney, Australia, said on Sunday that they had found traces of asbestos at 34 public sites across the city in recent weeks, and that a venue for an upcoming Taylor Swift concert was declared free of the toxic mineral.The hunt for asbestos in recycled mulch in the city began last month, and sites that have tested positive include parks and the grounds of hospitals, train stations, supermarkets and four schools, two of which have temporarily closed. The figures released by the Environmental Protection Agency of New South Wales on Sunday included two new sites, both schools.The scandal has received international attention in part because the authorities have been testing mulch on the grounds of Sydney Olympic Park, where Ms. Swift is scheduled to perform four shows starting on Friday. But the agency said on Sunday that those tests were negative.“I can say with certainty that the Harbor City is ready to welcome Taylor Swift with open arms,” Tony Chappel, the agency’s chief executive, told reporters on Sunday.If inhaled, asbestos fibers can cause lung diseases like asbestosis, lung cancer and mesothelioma. Laws about it vary by country: Asbestos is not banned in the United States, while the European Union banned white asbestos, the most common form, in 2005.Australia began to phase out asbestos in the 1980s and banned it completely in 2003. But the substance had already been used for construction, automotive manufacturing and other uses for decades. Many homes that were built there before the 1990s still contain asbestos.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Taylor Swift, Usher and a Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl Win in Las Vegas

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      Take America’s biggest game, add Taylor Swift and Usher, and put it all in Las Vegas, and Kansas City’s repeat as Super Bowl champion makes perfect sense.At some point, the Super Bowl stopped being entirely about football and evolved — or is it devolved — into a corporate carnival with lavish parties, halftime extravaganzas and commercials whose budgets seemed to rival a blockbuster movie.The apex of that transformation arrived with the N.F.L. planting this year’s event in Las Vegas, where the prevailing ethos might well be that a bellyful of anything is barely enough.But Super Bowl LVIII, with its attendant flash — and America’s favorite football fan, Taylor Swift, chugging a beer in a private box — demonstrated on Sunday night how sports stands apart from other types of entertainment.If the Kansas City Chiefs’ 25-22 overtime victory over the San Francisco 49ers was as tightly scripted as Usher’s elaborate choreography, the teams might have been pelted with rotten tomatoes or booed off the stage by halftime. It was mostly an evening of stumbles and bumbles: two fumbles, an interception, a muffed punt, a blocked extra point, a raft of untimely penalties — and for the 49ers enough regrets to last a lifetime.But all the mistakes and all those field goals — seven in all — would eventually be subsumed by the tension that unfolded in the fourth quarter and continued on into overtime of what became the longest game in Super Bowl history.Kansas City receiver Mecole Hardman caught the winning touchdown with three seconds left in the first overtime period.Bridget Bennett for The New York TimesWe 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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Taylor Swift Gives a Fashion Brand a Boost at the Super Bowl

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      Who says Area is just about the concept and not the clothes?About half an hour after the Area show ended in New York on Super Bowl Sunday, Taylor Swift appeared in Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas wearing a pair of the brand’s “crystal slit jeans” — a high-waist denim style sliced diagonally at the center of each thigh, the patently faux “rip” framed by diamanté. It was like a runway-to-real-life feature happening in actual time — or Super time.Area, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary, is generally one of those fashion week brands that most nonfashion people see and say, “But who would wear that?” (Well, other than Simone Biles making a viral statement at the Met Gala.) Ms. Swift was the perfect answer. The designer Piotrek Panszczyk — and indeed all of fashion, which sometimes suffers from a clothes-concept perception gap — could not have planned it better had he tried.Mr. Panszczyk sits firmly in the Moschino-Schiaparelli fashion tradition of wielding sartorial humor as a commentary on contemporary life, though he tends to sit on the punny performance art end of that spectrum. Last season he used “Flintstones” bones and “Dynasty” faux furs to symbolize the evolution of luxury and caste signaling, which came after a season built around the idea of fruit and mortality, mostly in the form of banana skirts. The looks attract the sort of person who does not mind going on a milk run in Bushwick draped in rhinestones and not much else.Ms. Swift, however, is an endorsement of a different kind. It’s not the first time she has worn Area denim. Last April she wore the brand’s crystal butterfly jeans in New York, and in October she wore a pair of Area embellished jeans shorts to another Chiefs game. (She does like a bit of sparkle.) But this is the first time she wore its denim when more than 100 million people were watching. It’s a potent, and deserved, argument for the future of Area as a credible business, rather than merely a fashion week gimmick.AreaAreaAreaAreaAreaAreaAs was the latest collection, which chose as its hot topic the peculiarly modern state of endless watching — of looking, and being looked at in turn. One that seemed notably apropos given the attention being paid to Ms. Swift and everything she does. It’s a serious subject, but the clothes were awfully fun.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Super Bowl Could Make Mint for the NFL

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      An overtime classic, featuring appearances by Usher and Taylor Swift, could make this year’s Super Bowl a hugely profitable money-maker for the N.F.L.Did the Taylor Swift effect vault this year’s Super Bowl into the record books?John G Mabanglo/EPA, via ShutterstockThe N.F.L. scores bigIn many ways, the N.F.L. couldn’t have asked for a better outcome for the Super Bowl. It got a thrilling overtime victory that cemented the Kansas City Chiefs as the league’s latest dynasty; a well-reviewed halftime show by Usher; a full roster of pricey ads; and, of course, Taylor Swift in person.It was a powerful reminder of the Super Bowl’s singular perch in America’s cultural landscape, and how that can translate into billions for a juggernaut sports league.The game was a place to see and be seen. Yes, Swift arrived in time from Japan to cheer on her boyfriend, the Chiefs star Travis Kelce. And A-list celebrities like Jay-Z, Beyoncé and LeBron James were spotted at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas.Also in attendance were corporate moguls including Elon Musk — who touted a surge in activity on his X social network during the game — Tim Cook of Apple and the Twitter and Block co-founder Jack Dorsey, who was wearing a crypto in-joke T-shirt.The game could set a record. The broadcast, perhaps aided by an army of Swift fans, may surpass the 115 million viewers who tuned in last year, making that the most-watched show in U.S. history. (Viewership for N.F.L. games has rebounded strongly in recent years; the A.F.C. and N.F.C. championship matches on Jan. 28 accounted for nearly 39 percent of national linear TV viewing.)That would help explain why advertisers were still willing to fork over $7 million for a 30-second spot during last night’s broadcast. (More on the ads later.) “In this era of fragmentation, the Super Bowl is what television used to be,” Brad Adgate, a veteran media analyst, told The Times.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      2024 Grammys, Dissected: Taylor, Miley, SZA, Tracy, Joni and More

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicAt Sunday’s Grammy Awards, Taylor Swift won album of the year for “Midnights” and, for good measure, announced a new album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” due in April. Other big winners included Victoria Monét, Phoebe Bridgers (and boygenius), Killer Mike, Miley Cyrus and Billie Eilish.The show featured several moving live performances from elders: Tracy Chapman duetting with Luke Combs on “Fast Car,” a striking Joni Mitchell singalong and a closing stomper from Billy Joel.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation on whether this was the year the Grammys got it correct, whether there was a gap between what the awards indicated and what the speeches were saying, and the grounded joy of seeing worthy stars brought back into the spotlight properly.Guests:Caryn Ganz, The New York Times’s pop music editorJon Pareles, The New York Times’s chief pop music criticLindsay Zoladz, a New York Times pop music criticConnect 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