This week, Taylor Swift’s 1989 debuted at no. 1 on the Billboard 200. And it didn’t just top the chart; her album scored the biggest debut since Adele’s 25 released in 2015.
This is an odd milestone considering that Swift released 1989 in October 2014—surely you recall the album’s ubiquitous millennial pop anthems “Blank Space,” “Bad Blood,” and “Shake It Off.” But that was the old 1989. The new 1989—the album that last week outperformed the streaming figures of the original release in the same period by more than 1,300 percent—is 1989 (Taylor’s Version). This is the latest of several such rerecordings, each debuting at no. 1 and each marketed as “Taylor’s Version,” hinting at the underlying vendetta that prompted dueling versions of these albums in the first place: Scooter Braun’s purchase of Big Machine for over $300 million in a secretive deal with the record label’s founder, Scott Borchetta, that incurred the wildly productive wrath of Swift.
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