Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), out July 7, is the third album—and the halfway point—in Taylor Swift’s re-recording project. The 33-year-old pop star began releasing re-recordings of her back catalog in 2021 in an effort to reclaim her original music, after her initial label Big Machine Records sold her masters to Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings in 2019.
“Now Scooter has stripped me of my life’s work, that I wasn’t given an opportunity to buy,” Swift wrote in a 2019 Tumblr post in response to news of the sale. “Essentially, my musical legacy is about to lie in the hands of someone who tried to dismantle it.”
The remaking of Swift’s early discography, which includes her first six albums, has so far found success, with fans eager to listen to her new vocals, unpack its various easter eggs, and purchase new merchandise. Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) is expected to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart, which would give Swift the third-most No. 1 albums of any artist of all time, surpassing Barbra Streisand And Bruce Springsteen.
Swift’s re-recorded albums have already broken records: Fearless (Taylor’s Version) was the first re-recorded album in history to top Billboard’s charts and Red (Taylor’s Version) broke Spotify’s record for the most-streamed album in a day by a female artist when it was released.
The first re-recorded album in Swift’s project was Fearless (Taylor’s Version), which recreated her 2008 album. The original album performed well upon its debut—its track “Love Story” debuted at number 25 on a Billboard country chart, becoming Swift’s highest debuting song of her career at the time.
The re-recorded album, which was released April 2021, came shortly after Swift released two new albums in 2020, folklore and evermore. The new Fearless included remakes of Swift’s earlier successful songs like “Love Story” and “Fifteen,” as well as six additional songs known as “vault tracks” that weren’t included in the original album.
According to Billboard, Fearless (Taylor’s Version) performed even better than the original, when looking at streams and sales within its first year. The new version earned more equivalent album units—a measurement that accounts for streaming, song downloads and traditional album sales—in its first week of release than the original did over the next year. At the time of its release, Fearless (Taylor’s Version) was the biggest debut week for any 2021 album. It went on to spend 11 total weeks in the top 40 of the Billboard 200 chart in 2021; and totaled 722.7 million on-demand U.S. streams over its first year, according to Billboard.