Taylor Swift defeats Taylor Swift, also everybody else, with sales for 1989 (Taylor's Version)

Taylor Swift has now officially beaten pretty much the only person on the planet giving her a real fight for pop music dominance at the moment: Herself. This is per Deadline, reporting on the first serious sales numbers for Swift’s latest release, the (Taylor’s Version) edition of her 2014 album 1989, the one that took her from “incredibly successful country music with a lot of crossover appeal” to “pretty much the queen of modern pop music.”

But while the original version of 1989 was a big deal, ultimately spending something like 300 weeks on the Billboard charts, the (Taylor’s Version) re-recording seems to be doing even better. Arriving (unsurprisingly) at the very top of the album sales charts, the new 1989 has sold 1.6 million units in the United States alone, and 3.5 million across the planet. Compare that to the 1.287 million albums sold in the U.S. back in 2014, which was already a seismic number, and it’s easy to see why Swift thought this whole (Taylor’s Version) project might work out. (In fact, each of these new versions of the albums has out-sold the originals, which has got to be a nice thumb in the eye to Swift’s long-time enemy Scooter Braun, who continues to profit off the masters of her earlier albums despite having sold them to Disney a few years back.)

Meanwhile, over in streaming land—where, it’s worth remembering, the original 1989 was a landmark release on account of not being available there, as Swift waged war with Spotify and its ilk over royalty structures—the album is having similarly massive success, where it’s been labeled the biggest debut of 2023, and the second biggest debut of all time, arriving just behind, you guessed it, an album called “Midnights” by little-known recording artist Taylor Swift.