She's also proven that she's not afraid to stand up for herself, either. The Mueller lawsuit aside, she also found herself embroiled in perhaps the greatest media scrutiny of her career courtesy of Kanye West, Kim Kardashian and a narrative that, at this point, we'd all very much like to be excluded from. After being branded a snake for supposedly feigning shock over lyrics in Kanye's track "Famous" that name-checked her after she approved them--she maintained that she never OK'd him calling her a "bitch," an assertion Kanye and Kim couldn't disprove with the secretly-recorded audio Kim released--she wrote a whole album about it and brought out a 63-foot inflatable cobra named Karyn on stage every night on tour. When Reputation was released on November 10, 2017, it made her the first act in the United States to have four albums sell over one million units in one week. That's what we call a checkmate.

The release of Reputation also saw Taylor fulfill her 12-year contract with Scott Borchetta's Big Machine Records and exactly a year later, she signed a landmark deal with Universal Music Group that not only gave her ownership over her master recordings, but allowed for her to do something that would benefit thousands of other musicians as well. "As part of my new contract with Universal Music Group, I asked that any sale of their Spotify shares result in a distribution of money to their artist, non-recoupable," she wrote in an Instagram post. "They have generously agreed to this, at what they believe will be much better terms than paid out previously by other major labels." She added that the provision "meant more to me than any other deal point" and was a sign that "we are headed toward positive change for creators — a goal I'm never going to stop trying to help achieve, in whatever ways I can." We love a magnanimous queen.