Taylor Swift's going to need a bigger house for all those awards.
In 2023, the singer-songwriter not only won the heart of the Kansas City Chiefs' Travis Kelce, but also millions of iHeartRadio listeners, according to its just-released rankings of the year's top artists and songs. Swift leads the iHeartRewind list of top overall artists, with more than 2.8 billion total audience spins and streams on iHeart stations nationwide and on its app. That total is driven not only by hits from her latest album release “Midnights,” but also from the re-recorded “1989 (Taylor's Version)” which dropped in October, and the re-release of 2019 track “Cruel Summer,” which topped Mediabase's CHR and hot AC airplay charts and Billboard's Hot 100.
Swift also takes the prize for top pop artist, and for top summer song – with, as it happens, “Cruel Summer” – while her lead single from “Midnights,” “Anti-Hero,” finishes as the No. 8 song overall for 2023.
Along with Swift, two other acts, SZA and Morgan Wallen, log more than two billion total audience spins, the former with more than 2.3 billion and the latter exceeding 2.1 billion. SZA, who's iHeart's top hip-hop artist and No. 2 pop act, places two songs in the overall top 10, “Kill Bill” at No. 5 and “Snooze” at No. 10. Wallen, who's the top country artist, finishes seventh overall with “Last Night” and claims two of country's top three songs with that and “Thought You Should Know.”
Ruling iHeart's top overall songs is “Flowers” from Miley Cyrus, who's fifth-ranked among artists. Placing second and third respectively are Metro Boomin featuring The Weeknd & 21 Savage's “Creepin'” – which is iHeart's top pop song and No. 4 hip-hop song of the year – and Rema & Selena Gomez's “Calm Down.” Metro Boomin and Rema/Gomez rank at Nos. 7 and 8 among top overall artists, while The Weekend places fourth on both the artist and song list, the latter with his re-release of 2016's “Die for You.”
Topping iHeart's country songs for 2023 is Bailey Zimmerman's “Rock and a Hard Place,” while Future featuring Drake's “Wait for U” leads the year's top hip-hop songs. At alternative, Linkin Park takes both top artist and song honors, the latter with “Lost,” the until-this-year unreleased track from the band's 2003 album “Meteora.”
iHeart also ranks the top artists and songs by generation, with SZA and Swift's “Cruel Summer” the top artist and song among GenZs, and Swift and Cyrus' “Flowers” tops among Millennials. For GenX, Bon Jovi is the top act and Guns N' Roses' “Welcome to the Jungle” top song, while for Baby Boomers, it's Queen, and Lynyrd Skynyrd's “Sweet Home Alabama.”
iHeart's rankings are based on total audience spins, computed using Mediabase airplay multiplied by persons listening at the time of those plays, delivering total audience impressions, which is the broadcast equivalent of the number of streams from a streaming music service.