Disclaimer; this is clearly going to be about personal tastes.
However, it has to be argued: Taylor hardly breaks through genres to create entirely new ones, as Brian Wilson or Sly Stone did.
Taylor is a ‘safe’ songwriter whose market is intolerant of exceeding the limits of her chosen genre - Brian and Sly, however, can be perceived as being far more progressive as artists, willing not only to break the conformity of their extant music market, but to excel at creating entire new genres on their own.
What is Taylors “Pet Songs”?
Taylor Swift is the least likely of the three to have created her own genre of music outside market expectations. While she’s undeniably innovative, her contributions largely refine and personalize existing genres (country, pop, indie-folk) rather than inventing entirely new ones.
Both Wilson and Stone created groundbreaking sounds—Wilson with orchestral pop and Stone with funk/psychedelic soul—that were more radical departures from their era’s commercial norms.
Between Wilson and Stone, Stone’s creation of funk and his influence across multiple genres (funk, soul, rock, hip-hop) arguably had a broader impact, but Swift’s work, while transformative, operates more within established frameworks.
We won't really see until in retrospect. Something that today is "some little thing that one band does" may turn into something that gets seen as a whole genre tomorrow.
Case in point: I recently listened to "Tracks and Traces", a compilation of things Brian Eno did with Harmonia in 1976.
It IS "post-rock". You could slip some tracks from that album onto Mogwai's albums from the 2000s, and you would hardly notice something is amiss. And you know it wasn't a direct influence, because the recordings were only released 30 years later.
She certainly makes a lot of money. Brian Wilson was a writers writer. Taylor Swift isn't writing anything interesting that makes any song writer go "holy shit, that's genius". Music theorists don't study her music, she's not doing anything groundbreaking or new. She writes catchy songs for sure, but a lot of people do that.
