Taylor Swift Tops the Charts and Sets Records with New Version of “Fearless”

Taylor Swift at the 2019 Teen Choice Awards.
Taylor Swift at the 2019 Teen Choice Awards. Photo by Michael Buckner/Variety/Shutterstock (10359323cg)

There was a lot of buzz surrounding the re-recorded version of Taylor Swift’s album Fearless and its chart domination was to be expected. This record topped the Billboard 200 chart with the biggest week of the year and set several important records in its wake.

Fearless (Taylor’s Version) easily soared to the top of the charts with 291,000 album-equivalent units earned in its first week. It repeated the success of Swift’s previous two albums Folklore and Evermore, transforming her into the first female artist to top the Billboard 200 with three different albums in less than a year.

To make the whole thing even more impressive, Swift managed to break her own record for the shortest gap between no. 1 albums atop the Billboard 200 released by a female artist. Fearless (Taylor’s Version) also had the biggest weekly streams for a country album by a woman.

This album is only the first in the long line of Swift’s re-recordings, after the dispute with her old label that left her fighting for the ownership of her old catalog. It hit the shelves on April 9th, and gave fans six new tracks “from the vault”, in addition to re-recordings of all tracks from the platinum edition of Fearless.