Taylor Swift’s ‘I Knew It, I Knew You’ wins with 35% of Billboard new-music vote

Taylor Swift has a new song out, and Billboard readers made it the week’s runaway favorite: “I Knew It, I Knew You” captured 35% of the vote in a Billboard new music poll published Friday (June 6). By closing time on Sunday, poll results showed Swift held onto the lead with 35% of the vote, beating every other new release listed.

That matters because this was not a random single getting discovered in a vacuum. The track is an original written specifically for the Toy Story 5 movie soundtrack, and it arrived in a tight window around the film’s launch cycle. Toy Story 5 opens in theaters on June 19, so the song is effectively part of the movie’s early cultural roll-out, not just a standalone streaming drop.

In the poll, Swift’s lead also came with a clear leaderboard behind her. Tinashe’s “Too Easy” placed second with 28% of the vote. Vybz Kartel’s “God & Time” followed with 18% of the vote. Niall Horan’s “Dinner Party” trailed farther behind at 5% of the vote. In other words, Swift did not merely top the field. She separated enough that the rest of the pack mostly looks like supporting acts rather than true contenders for the week’s top spot.

The timing and execution behind the song are part of the reason the results feel so decisive. The source reports that Swift officially announced “I Knew It, I Knew You” just days before its Friday debut, then shared she'd “always dreamed of getting to write for these characters who I’ve adored since I was a 5 year old kid watching the first Toy Story movie. I fell instantly in love with Toy Story 5 when I was lucky enough to see it in its early stages, and I wrote this song as soon as I got home from the screening.” That quote is doing heavy lifting, because it frames the collaboration as long-running passion and immediate creative payoff rather than a last-minute marketing assignment.

Musically, the track also signals where Swift’s head is at. The source notes that Swift reunites in the studio with longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff. It also points out that on The Life of a Showgirl she shifted to Max Martin and Shellback production, so this return to Antonoff is not just “new song, same vibe.” The write-up says “I Knew It, I Knew You” “musically harkens back to the star's earlier pop-country era,” and the track’s narrative theme is leaving a porch light on for her muse. The piece includes the lyrics “I remembered I loved you / Came back when it mattered, I saw you / Standing there in the light of the window wearing that same smile / Man, it's been a while / But I knew it, I knew you.” That emotional framing is the kind of concrete storytelling fans tend to reward with clicks, repeat listens, and, in this case, votes.

The rollout extended beyond audio. Soon after its release, the song was accompanied by an animated video featuring clips of Jessie, Woody, and Buzz from the Pixar and Disney Toy Story film franchise. This is a second-order distribution win: instead of treating the track as content floating on its own, it ties the song to recognizable characters and visuals, which tends to compress the distance between audience attention and brand memory.

For executives and boards, there is a broader implication lurking under the fun: polls like this function like a fast, low-friction market signal. They are not regulatory filings or ticket presales, but they do capture audience preference in real time, week by week, across a set of contemporaneous releases. When a single artist can command 35% in a field that includes high-profile names like Tinashe, Vybz Kartel, and Niall Horan, it suggests that attention is not evenly distributed. It also hints that fandom-driven releases can dominate mainstream discovery algorithms, because the vote itself is a proxy for engagement.

And that is where the stakes tighten. Toy Story 5 is opening June 19, so the song’s performance sits upstream of the film’s theater push. If audiences are already signaling strong preference for the soundtrack original, the movie benefits from amplified brand lift, while labels, publishers, and creative partners benefit from clearer proof of concept for cross-property collaborations. The rest of the industry is watching those signals closely, because the next big partnership deal will not be evaluated only on cost and creative ambition. It will be judged on whether the audience shows up loudly, early, and at scale.