On Wednesday night (Aug. 9 – 8/9, get it?), Taylor Swift ended the final show of this U.S. leg of her Eras world tour by making fans’ wildest dreams come true: 1989 (Taylor’s Version) was officially on its way.
The fourth album in the superstar’s six-part re-recording project would be her landmark 2014 album, which will be released on Oct. 27 – nine years to the day that the original 1989 was unveiled. 1989 (Taylor’s Version) will follow Fearless (Taylor’s Version), Red (Taylor’s Version) and Speak Now (Taylor’s Version); the lattermost just scored the biggest debut on the Billboard 200 chart of the year upon its release last month, while the first two topped the Billboard 200 upon their releases in 2021.
Although all of Swift’s studio albums are blockbusters to some degree, 1989 is especially indispensable to her story. With hits like “Shake It Off,” “Blank Space,” “Style” and “Bad Blood,” the album represented as an embrace of full-on pop music, after years of expanding the sonic boundaries of country music.
“The 1989 album changed my life in countless ways,” Swift wrote while announcing the re-recorded version. And along with the artistic growth that the 2014 full-length represented, the album’s commercial performance was downright mind-boggling, a particularly dominant professional moment in a career full of them.
Ahead of the release of 1989 (Taylor’s Version) release this fall, let’s dig into nine key numbers that demonstrate both the blockbuster performance of 1989, and why fans are so excited about its re-recorded version.
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3 No. 1 Hot 100 hits
1989 has the distinction of being the Swift album with the most Hot 100 chart-toppers on its track list. Lead single “Shake It Off” spent four nonconsecutive weeks atop the Hot 100 in 2014, after which,“Blank Space” took over the top spot, where it spent seven weeks at No. 1 – the most of any Swift single, until “Anti-Hero” surpassed that mark with eight weeks earlier this year.
In May 2015, the release of a remix to “Bad Blood” featuring Kendrick Lamar, along with a star-studded music video, helped power the song to No. 1 for a single week. “Bad Blood” actually served as Lamar’s first Hot 100 chart-topper, although he’d return to the top spot with his own single, “Humble,” two years later.
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5 top 10 Hot 100 hits
In addition to “Shake It Off,” “Blank Space” and “Bad Blood” reaching the top of the Hot 100, “Style” peaked at No. 6 and “Wildest Dreams” made it to No. 5. (“Out of the Woods,” the sixth official single from the album, reached No. 18.) Which Swift album has the most top 10 hits? Easy: Midnights scored 10 all at once, as Swift’s 2022 album made her the first artist in history to flood the entire top 10.
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1.287 million copies sold in its first week
Although Swift’s Speak Now (1.047 million) and Red (1.208 million) had both crossed the seven-figure mark in their debut weeks in 2010 and 2012, respectively, the final first-week total for 1989 surpassed both in 2014. The monster debut represented the largest sales week for an album in over a decade – since Eminem’s The Eminem Show bowed with 1.322 million in June 2002 – and made Swift the first artist with three million-plus sales weeks. Although 2017’s Reputation and 2022’s Midnights would also later cross that threshold, the debut figure for 1989 remains the biggest-ever pure sales week of Swift’s career.
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11 total weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200
Following that seven-figure bow on the albums chart upon its October 2014 release, 1989 dipped in and out of the No. 1 spot through February 2015. By October 2015, the album had spent its first full year in the top 10 of the Billboard 200 – only the fifth album in history, and Swift’s first album, to do so. Its 11 weeks at No. 1 is tied with Fearless for the most chart-topping frames by a Swift album.
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12.3 million equivalent album units to date
Nearly nine years after its enormous chart debut, 1989 stands atop her discography in terms of multi-metric consumption. To date, no Swift album has earned more equivalent album units – which comprise album sales, track equivalent albums (TEA) and streaming equivalent albums (SEA) – than 1989, with 12.3 million units, according to Luminate.
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$250.7 million grossed on The 1989 World Tour
Eight years before the Eras tour was the hottest ticket of the summer, Swift made her stadium debut with The 1989 World Tour in 2015, after multiple arena runs in support of previous albums. Over the course of 85 shows across North America, Europe, Asia and Australia, the 1989 world tour made over a quarter of a billion dollars, according to Boxscore, with $181.5 million of that figure grossed during the U.S. dates. Swift would surpass both totals with her Reputation Stadium Tour three years later, and while The Eras Tour’s grosses have yet to be reported, one can imagine that they could be her loftiest numbers to date.
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2nd Album of the Year Grammy win
After winning the top prize at the 2010 Grammy Awards with Fearless, which gave Swift an album of the year trophy at the age of 20, she was back at the podium six years later, when 1989 emerged victorious at the 2016 ceremony. (In between, Red was nominated in 2014, but lost out to Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories.)
With the win for 1989, Swift became the first female solo artist to take home multiple album of the year Grammys – and she joined even more elite company when Folklore became her third winner in 2021. Now, Swift is among Frank Sinatra, Stevie Wonder and Paul Simon as the only artists with three album of the year trophies.
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2 re-recorded songs already released
Although anticipation for 1989 (Taylor’s Version) has been sky-high for months, fans have already been gifted a pair of re-recorded songs that will appear on the track list. In September 2021, Swift unexpectedly unveiled “Wildest Dreams (Taylor’s Version),” after spotting fans using the original recording on TikTok; the re-recorded version surged onto the Hot 100, peaking at No. 37.
And in May 2022, we got the reworked version of “This Love,” after it was featured in a trailer to the Amazon Prime series The Summer I Turned Pretty. “This Love” had never made the Hot 100 in its original form, but “This Love (Taylor’s Version)” reached No. 50 on the chart last year.
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5 new “From the Vault” songs
“To be perfectly honest,” Swift wrote while announcing 1989 (Taylor’s Version) on social media, “this is my most FAVORITE re-record I’ve ever done because the 5 From The Vault tracks are so insane.” Between Fearless (Taylor’s Version), Red (Taylor’s Version) and Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), fans have thus far received 21 “From the Vault” songs – compositions that Swift has dusted off from those albums’ respective studio sessions, recorded anew, and included on the re-recordings.
Although Swift did not share any details of the revived tracks from 1989 (Taylor’s Version), the previously released “From the Vault” songs have included guest stars like Phoebe Bridgers, Ed Sheeran, Maren Morris and Fall Out Boy. “I can’t believe they were ever left behind,” Swift wrote. “But not for long!”
