Taylor Swift Sweeps Billboard Music Awards With Eight Wins

NASHVILLE, Tenn., May 20, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Taylor Swift was the big winner at last night's Billboard Music Awards, sweeping the top all-genre categories and taking home eight awards. Taylor won Artist of the Year, Top Billboard 200 Artist (her second win in this category in three years), Top Female Artist, Top Digital Songs Artist, Top Billboard 200 Album (for RED), Top Country Artist, Top Country Album (for RED), and Top Country Song (for "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together").

Released in October of last year, RED has already sold more than 5.8 million copies worldwide, including 1.2 million in the U.S. in its first week of release, music's biggest first-week sales number in more than a decade. Called "the slickest, smartest and just plain best mega-pop statement of our time" by Rolling Stone, and "sublime….required listening" by Entertainment Weekly, RED set a new worldwide iTunes record for highest ever first-week album sales, and reached #1 on iTunes and national sales charts in 50 countries around the globe.

With RED, Taylor became the first artist since the Beatles (and the only female artist in history) to log six or more weeks at #1 with three consecutive studio albums, and she is the only female artist in music history (and just the fourth artist ever) to twice have an album hit the 1 million first-week sales figure. Taylor is Billboard's youngest-ever Woman of the Year, holds the record for the most songs (11), to debut in the Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 in the chart's more-than-five-decade history, and also holds the Hot 100 record for most songs by a female artist on the chart in a single week.

Taylor, dubbed "officially the new Mick Jagger" by Vanity Fair and heralded as "a true arena-rock goddess at an amazing peak" in Rolling Stone, is currently on the road with the North American portion of The RED Tour, playing 66 shows (including 13 stadium stops) in 47 cities in 29 states and 3 provinces spanning 6 months in 2013. Just last week it was announced that Taylor will take The RED Tour to Australia and New Zealand later this year, performing stadium shows in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, as well as an arena date in Auckland. Taylor will be the first solo female artist in twenty years to undertake a national stadium tour of Australia, with the last being Madonna's Girlie Show tour in 1993. Due to strong fan demand in the initial pre-sales, an additional show has already been added to the previously announced itinerary.

Taylor, who writes all of her own songs, is a seven-time GRAMMY winner, and is the youngest winner in history of the music industry's highest honor, the GRAMMY Award for Album of the Year. Taylor has an album on Rolling Stone's prestigious The 50 Greatest Albums of All Time (by women) list, and Time magazine has named her one of the 100 Most Influential people in the world. Taylor, who is signed to Big Machine Records, has career record sales in excess of 26 million albums and 75 million song downloads worldwide, and has had singles top both the country and pop radio charts around the globe.

Taylor is nominated for two CMT Music Awards, which will be presented June 5^th from Nashville.

For updated tour dates and information, please log on to: www.taylorswift.com.

SOURCE Big Machine Records