These landmark career milestones provoked contentious comparisons from media and fans. However, the two artists are held to very different standards.

BEING ONE-OF-ONE, THE NUMBER ONE, THE ONLY ONE has emerged as Beyoncé’s most visible creative credo. This year, she became the most awarded artist in Grammy history and finished her most ambitious tour ever, taking her Renaissance album’s celebration of Black and gay culture to stadiums all over the world. Meanwhile, Taylor Swift rose to a unique level of global fame, shattering chart records and giving her own extravaganza on the Eras tour, which spanned her whole career. Both artists have spent decades preparing for these legacy-defining moments. Over time, their stories have rarely intersected.

But this year, they’ve been frequently compared to one another based on their tours and the accompanying concert films, which both debuted in theaters this fall. “There were so many stadium tours this summer, but the only ones that were compared were me and Beyoncé,” Swift told Time, which awarded her Person of the Year in 2023. The format of these releases has given fans a numerical basis for easy comparison: stadium sizes, ticket sales, and box-office figures. “Clearly it’s very lucrative for the media and stan culture to pit two women against each other,” she said, “even when those two artists in question refuse to participate in that discussion.” Nevertheless, the parallels have remained.

It’s profitable only in the sense that it allows for the continuation of an unproductive and circular conversation that ignores an important truth: the intangible value of the space that music creates for people cannot be numerically quantified — and individual moments cannot be compared to holistic legacies. Over the previous 26 years, innumerable instances have contributed to Beyoncé’s ability to redefine what it means to be an unrivaled cultural icon in the digital age. And over the last 17 years, a nearly entirely different set of events have conspired to establish Swift as the pop titan we know her as today. A Venn diagram comparing these two figures and the circumstances that influenced their rise to these heights would have little more in the center than their subsequent capitalistic achievements.