music winners of 2014

This past weekend, Taylor Swift found herself celebrating her 25th birthday in grand fashion: by closing out the annual z100 Jingle Ball BLL -0.2% at Madison Square Garden in front of nearly 20,000 people, including  Sam Smith, Iggy Azalea and Calvin Harris.

“New York City, it’s good to be home!” she yelled toward the beginning of her set.

A recent arrival in the Big Apple AAPL -0.46%, Swift should also feel at home with the aforementioned names who watched her set after gracing the stage before her — all of them are among the music industry’s biggest winners of the past year. Let’s take a deeper look. First things first…

Taylor Swift

She sold 1.3 million copies of her latest album, 1989, in its first week. No other solo act has seen an album go platinum in its opening week since Swift last did it with Red in 2012. Even more impressive, her latest effort is the only album that has gone platinum at all in 2014 (unless you count the Frozen soundtrack).

But Swift’s record sales aren’t the only thing that make her one of this year’s winners. She’s taken a stand on the monetization of music, first with an op-ed she penned for the Wall Street Journal this summer and more recently by pulling her music from Spotify.

You can disagree with the sentiments expressed — I, for one, believe Spotify and its ilk represent not only music’s future, but its present — but there’s no denying Swift has positioned herself as a thought leader in the debate, all before her 25th birthday. And in the process, she’s garnered a ton of publicity for her latest release.

The U.K. And Its Former Colonies

It may not be the British invasion, but artists from the U.K. and its former colonies have had an outsized impact on the international music of late. This year has seen solo British acts like Ed Sheeran and the aforementioned Sam Smith reach superstar status; Scottish grocery store stockboy Calvin Harris is now the world’s highest-paid DJ and Ireland’s own Hozier is generating the biggest Grammy buzz the Emerald Isle has seen in some time.

It’s not just the British Isles. Australians including Jingle Ball performers Iggy Azalea and 5 Seconds of Summer are driving conversation and sales in hip-hop and pop-rock arenas. Of course, this isn’t the first time something like this has happened — there are plenty of examples, from George Michael to U2 to Lorde — but it seems non-American anglophone music is again on the upswing.

Dr. Dre

The hip-hop superproducer has been among rap’s top earners since FORBES first started measuring in 2007, but recent years have been even kinder to Dre. After earning $150 million from 2012-2013, he scored a whopping $620 million payday in 2014, thanks almost entirely to the sale of his Beats empire to Apple for $3 billion.

That total makes the top-earning musician of any genre this year — and gives him the record for the largest single-year earnings figure for any musician, ever. He’s got more to come, too, as Apple paid $2.6 billion to Beats stakeholders upfront and will dole out another $400 million in the coming years.

Dre’s example shows one of the key realities of the current music business. Though recorded music is the engine that drives the industry, it’s sometimes just a means to an end on the financial side. Artists who build great careers by making popular music can still monetize their success, but it most likely won’t be through income directly derived from recorded music.