Incredible: It’s the age of Swiftonomics – Can one “record-breaking megastar” Taylor Swift’s make a difference for phenomenal success trickle down?

Taylor Swift’s new album, The Tortured Poets Department, is not one of her best. Critics have complained about its exhausting length (31 songs, two hours), subdued tone and lyrical wound-rubbing. Her decision to announce it at the Grammy awards, months before its release on 19 April, was widely seen as tacky, snatching the media spotlight from other winners.

For any other artist, this might be a perilous moment of bubble-bursting hubris, but 34-year-old Taylor Alison Swift is not any other artist. The album set a streaming record on Spotify – 300m in one day and 1bn in five – and made her the first artist in history to secure the top 14 spots on the Billboard Hot 100. In the US, it sold 2.6m copies in the first week, second only to Adele’s 3.4m nine years ago, with 859,000 on vinyl alone.

Swift is a formidable singer-songwriter, but these days she is as likely to feature in the business pages as the music pages. Last October, off the back of the first leg of her Eras tour, she was declared a billionaire – the first person to pass that milestone through music-related earnings alone rather than other investments. Eras became the first billion-dollar tour in history, selling 2.4m tickets in a single day. Forbes estimated she was earning $10m-$13m (£8m-£10m) a night. And the tour movie is the highest grossing of all time, at $262m.

“The Eras tour turned out to be a juggernaut that even she couldn’t have anticipated,” says Carl Wilson, pop critic for Slate. “I can’t remember another phenomenon like it in live music.”

As the tour made its way across North America, local economies boomed, with fans spending an average of $1,325, including travel, accommodation, food and drink. The UK leg is predicted to boost the economy by £1bn, while Singapore outbid rival nations to ensure it was the only Swift-blessed country in south-east Asia. Media fascination with the tour has given birth to a new word, Swiftonomics, and university courses devoted to it.

To find a similarly dominant artist, you’d have to go back to Michael Jackson in the 80s, but thanks to the smartphone, Swift is still more ubiquitous. “Even when Thriller was the biggest thing in the world, you could spend a day without thinking about Michael Jackson,” Wilson says of the artist’s 1982 album. “You’re going to run across something about Taylor Swift every day of your life. When people look back on this last decade, she’s the face in the montage, right?”

That Swift is one of the most financially canny pop stars in history is beyond doubt. She has leveraged her power to cut deals with concert promoters, record labels and platforms that have never been made before. And while she has an A-list team, including renowned attorney Don Passman, there is no doubt that Swift, the daughter of a financial adviser, makes the big calls herself. What is less clear is what her disproportionate success means to the music industry at large. Is she making the weather or simply capitalising on existing trends? Have her spectacular achievements helped other artists, hurt them, or made no difference at all? As Will Page, former chief economist of Spotify and PRS for Music, puts it, “Does a Taylor Swift tide lift all boats?”