The National Consensus Ranking of Every Taylor Swift Album As of the Release of The Tortured Poets Department
Retro surveyed dozens of national and international publications whose experts have assessed Taylor Swift’s catalogue to determine the national consensus ranking of all her albums through March 2024.
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Introduction
So you’re just now making the decision to get into Taylor Swift’s oeuvre. Where do you start? This report is here to help you make that decision.
This is the second entry in Retro’s National Consensus Series—a mass data curation that aims to answer the most pressing questions in art. The first entry in the series, which focused on finding the national consensus of the best films of Wes Anderson, can be found here.
Rules
Only rankings that included all ten Taylor Swift albums prior to The Tortured Poets Department were used (see the section below for the rankings for Swift’s latest LP).
Albums were assigned points based on their standing in a given ten-album ranking; thus, an album ranked tenth received 1 point, and an album ranked first received 10.
Publications’ handling of Swift’s re-released albums was honored: that is, some chose whichever album version they deemed better to rank; some jointly ranked original and re-released albums (putting both in the same spot in the ranking); and some ignored the re-releases or ignored the original releases (if they were re-released) categorically.
If a publication ranked The Tortured Poets Department, that ranking was ignored for the purposes of the ten-album ranking below—but it was then noted for inclusion in the appropriate section of this report (see the “The Tortured Poets Department” section).