Taylor Swift, the platinum selling country/pop recording artist, released a new album “1989” on October 27, 2014 that has made an outstanding impact on not only her career thus far but also the music industry altogether. The album features 13 tracks that Swift has been working on since the release of her preceding album “Red” in October of 2012.

“1989” offers two singles, “Shake it Off” and “Blank Space”, which have both been risen to popularity in the short time that the have been available to the public. “Shake it Off” was released on August 18 of this year and debuted number one on the Billboard Hot 100, making it the 22^nd song to ever accomplish such a feat. The song spent one week in this position until Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass” replaced it, but after Trainor’s song spent eight weeks in the top spot, Swift’s song hit the top spot again this week after being in the runner up spot for eight weeks.

“Blank Space” was not the album’s lead single and was released along with the rest of the album on October 27, but the public has already received it very well. It deubted at number 18 on the Billboard Hot 100 and at number one on Digital Songs, making it Swift’s ninth song to debut at the number one Digital Song, and also making her the record holder for debuting this many songs at the top Digital Song spot.

Swift has not only been making the headlines because of her incredible album buzz, but also because she firmly declined permission to music streaming service Spotify to gain the rights of her album to play for its over 40 million users.

“In my opinion, music should not be free,” Swift said. “Piracy, file-sharing, and streaming have shrunk the number of paid album sales drastically.”

Regardless, Swift has somehow been able to have millions of people purchase her new album on iTunes. In fact, she is the only artist to have an album sell more than one million copies in its first week of release on iTunes. The last album to have accomplished this was back in 2012, and was released by, you guessed it, Taylor Swift.

One of the reasons that 1989 has received so much publicity is because of Swift’s drastic switch from her past loyalty to the country genre. For the first time in her career, she did not attend country music awards shows for this album, and listed it as a pop album in its entirety. Swift has had this sound in her music for a while, but has just now formally made the switch. In addition, she made a big move from her longtime home of Nashville, to New York City. Obviously, this has worked out her.

“For the last few years, I’ve woken up every day not wanting, but needing to write a new style of music. I needed to change the way I told my stories and the way they sounded,” Swift said in a news release from GoMoxie.

So that’s exactly what she did. Swift’s new style of music has been extremely well received by the public, and I would reccommend it.