After making the decision of her life by changing from country music to pop music, a decision which could have ruined her whole career, Taylor Swift released her first pop album, 1989. Despite the risk, this album would become the best selling album of her career, after selling over 1.2 million copies. Swift’s 2012 release of her album Red featured  some songs with her well-known country sound, but the new album will not touch base with her old country roots at all. Swift does not explain her extreme changes, but she does tell Rolling Stone magazine, “At a certain point, if you chase two rabbits, you lose them both.”

Not only is Swift changing the genre of her music, she did not attend the country music awards, nor will she promote her new album to country radio. I believe that this dramatic change for Swift could possibly be a gold mine for her. After hearing her two main tracks, “Shake it off” and “Blank Space,” and after having viewed the videos,  (“Shake it off” has had 330 million views, while “Blank Space” has had over 125 million views on YouTube), I believe she is in the right direction, and she is making a good choice of changing from country to the pop music genre. I had received a copy of the new album from Moxie.com, a music publicist that sends new releases to schools for a review as a way of promoting the music.

After listening to the entire album, I believe this is a great success for Swift all around, because as popular as country music has been not only historically, but as of late,  it seems that the taste in our generation is evolving toward the sounds of music rather than the lyrics of the song. This would prove the case of pop music overlapping the popularity of country music because pop music is more about the sound or the beat of the song, while country music has more emphasis on lyrics.