Song #12: "Blank Space (Taylor's Version)" by Taylor Swift

 

Song #12: Taylor Swift — “Blank Space (Taylor’s Version)”

🎵 Today’s Song

Taylor Swift — “Blank Space (Taylor’s Version)”
2023
Random draw
Selected era bucket: 2020–present
Verified remaining eligible population: 9,063 recordings
Selection method: Equal-probability era draw, then one uniform random draw from previously unselected eligible recordings in that era

Chart performance

Overall pop peak: #12
Billboard Hot 100: #12
Other relevant Billboard pop charts: Billboard Global 200 #9
Billboard R&B: N/A
Billboard Country: N/A
Other major charts: Canada #11; Australia #9; New Zealand #12
Yearly rank: #92
Weeks charted: 3
Weeks Top 20: 1
Weeks Top 10: 0
Weeks at peak: 1

Chart note: The entire Hot 100 run was #12 → #59 → #93 → out.

Taylor Swift at this point

Charting record: 228th of 286
Top-20 hit: 79th of 110
Top-10 hit: Not a Top-10 hit; 69 eventual Top-10 hits
#1 pop hit: Not a #1 hit; 14 eventual #1 hits
Previous Top-20: “Suburban Legends (Taylor’s Version) [From the Vault]”
Next Top-20: “Welcome to New York (Taylor’s Version)”

“Blank Space (TV),” “Suburban Legends (TV)” and “Welcome to New York (TV)” all entered on the same chart date. Under the project’s chronology rule, same-date entries are ordered by their debut-week chart positions.

Retrospective standing

GOAT overall: #22,135
Among Taylor Swift songs: #102 of 245
Among Taylor Swift Top-20 hits: #92 of 101
GOAT points: 8,424
Hot 100 portion of chart run: Peak #12; 3 weeks

Data note: The Extended career-history workbook and GOAT workbook have different coverage for Taylor Swift, so the denominators above are reported as they appear in their respective canonical sources rather than forced to reconcile.

Record details

Entered chart: November 11, 2023
Released: October 27, 2023
Recorded: Exact recording date not reliably established; vocals were recorded at Conway Recording Studios in Los Angeles and Kitty Committee Studio in New York
Single: N/A — album track; its Hot 100 appearance came with the release of 1989 (Taylor’s Version)
Album/soundtrack: 1989 (Taylor’s Version)
Songwriters: Taylor Swift, Max Martin, Shellback
Lead vocal / featured performer: Taylor Swift
Running time: 3:51
Label: Republic
Catalog number: Not reliably established for the individual track
Recording to use: The 2023 re-recording from 1989 (Taylor’s Version), not Swift’s original 2014 recording

Listen / watch / read

🎧 Original recording: Taylor Swift — “Blank Space (Taylor’s Version),” the official 2023 recording on Taylor Swift’s official artist channel / 1989 (Taylor’s Version)

📺 Official/original music video: No conventional music video was made specifically for the 2023 Taylor’s Version recording. Taylor Swift released an official “Blank Space (Taylor’s Version)” lyric video.

📝 Lyrics: Apple Music — “Blank Space (Taylor’s Version)”

Versions & title history

Original or cover: Re-recording by the original artist

Important earlier/later charting versions: Taylor Swift’s original 2014 recording of “Blank Space” is a separate charting recording and reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. The 2023 Taylor’s Version reached #12.

Same-title unrelated chart hits: None identified in the canonical project pool.

Streaming note

There is a significant version trap here. Streaming services contain both Swift’s 2014 original recording and her 2023 Taylor’s Version. For today’s selection, use the 2023 recording from 1989 (Taylor’s Version). The famous mansion music video belongs to the 2014 original and is not the recording selected today.

User rating

66/100

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There are days when the randomizer gives me a song and I wonder how I'm possibly going to find enough to say about it.

Today I had almost the opposite problem.

Taylor Swift's “Blank Space (Taylor's Version)” reached #12 on the Billboard Hot 100 in November 2023. It's a new recording of “Blank Space,” a song Swift originally released in 2014, when it went all the way to #1.

And the original “Blank Space” is still sitting somewhere in my pool of eligible songs.

That creates a problem. There is a lot I could talk about here: the lyrics, the character Swift plays in the song, the original production, the enormous music video, what the song meant in Swift's career in 2014, and what was going on culturally when it became one of her biggest hits.

But almost all of that belongs to the 2014 record.

If the randomizer eventually gives me the original “Blank Space,” I don't want to discover that I already wrote its post while discussing a different recording.

So today I'm going to do something unusual: I'm mostly going to leave “Blank Space” alone.

Instead, I want to talk about why there are two of them.

For simplicity, from here on I'm going to call the 2023 Taylor's Version recording TV, and the 2014 Original Version OV.

That distinction turns out to be pretty much the entire story today.

First, what exactly is a master?

To understand why TV exists at all, we need a quick detour into something most people probably don't think about when they put on a record.

A song and a recording of a song aren't exactly the same piece of property.

Taylor Swift co-wrote “Blank Space.” That gives her an interest in the underlying song—the melody and lyrics. But there is also a separate piece of intellectual property: the specific recording made in 2014. That recording has a master, essentially the definitive recorded performance from which the commercially released recording derives.

Owning that master matters.

The owner has a valuable economic interest whenever that particular recording is commercially exploited through things such as sales, streaming and licensing. It can also provide considerable control over how that recording is used.

And Swift didn't own the masters to her first six albums.

She had signed with Big Machine Records as a teenager, and under that recording arrangement, Big Machine owned the masters created during her time with the label. That wasn't some uniquely terrible deal invented for an unsuspecting Taylor Swift. Record labels owning artists' masters was a longstanding industry practice.

The important point is also not that Swift received nothing when somebody listened to one of those recordings. As a songwriter and performer, she still had economic interests in the music.

What she didn't have was ownership of the actual recorded asset.

As Taylor Swift became Taylor Swift, that distinction became increasingly significant.

In 2019, Big Machine—and with it the masters to Swift's first six albums—was sold to Scooter Braun's Ithaca Holdings. The masters were subsequently sold to Shamrock Capital in 2020.

Swift's solution was both remarkably simple and kind of insane:

Record the songs again.

Make another “Blank Space”

If Swift couldn't own the existing recording of “Blank Space,” she could make another recording that she did own.

That's where Taylor's Version comes in.

And this is an important distinction for today's song: the objective wasn't necessarily to make a better “Blank Space.”

It was to make a substitute “Blank Space.”

If the new recording sounded enough like the old one, a listener who wanted to hear “Blank Space” could choose TV instead of OV. A radio station could play TV instead of OV. Someone looking to license a recording could potentially have an alternative to the old master.

The economic activity would then be directed toward the recording Swift controlled.

That required something unusual, though.

It required the customers to participate.

Imagine another artist telling casual listeners:

“Here's a new recording of the song you already like. I'm deliberately going to make it sound a lot like the recording you already have. Please listen to this one instead.”

Why would I care?

I'm not a Swiftie. I'm also not remotely anti-Taylor Swift. I know a lot of her music, like quite a bit of it, and have followed her career in the normal way someone who pays too much attention to popular music would.

But before this project, I wasn't sitting around worrying about who owned the master recording of “Blank Space.”

If I wanted to hear “Blank Space,” I wanted to hear “Blank Space.”

That's what makes the Taylor's Version project so fascinating to me. Swift managed to persuade an enormous number of people that the distinction between the recordings mattered.

Giving people a reason to come back

The project began with Fearless (Taylor's Version) in 2021, followed by Red (Taylor's Version) later that year, Speak Now (Taylor's Version) in 2023, and 1989 (Taylor's Version) in October 2023.

But Swift didn't merely reproduce the old albums.

She also included “From the Vault” tracks—songs written during the period of the original albums but not previously released in these forms.

That seems like an extremely important part of the strategy.

There probably wasn't enormous pent-up demand among ordinary music listeners for recordings that attempted to sound almost exactly like recordings they already knew.

The vault tracks changed the proposition.

Now there was something new to hear.

And by the time we reached 1989 (Taylor's Version), the whole Taylor's Version concept had itself become an event.

The most ridiculous album bomb yet?

We've already encountered the modern album bomb in this project: a major artist releases an album, listeners immediately stream the whole thing, and suddenly the Hot 100 is flooded with songs from that artist.

But 1989 (Taylor's Version) presents an especially weird variation.

These weren't all new songs.

On the Hot 100 dated November 11, 2023, 12 songs from 1989 (Taylor's Version) appeared in the Top 20.

That's 60 percent of the entire Top 20 belonging to one album.

“Blank Space (TV)” was one of them, debuting at #12.

And here's the part I find most revealing: the four highest-charting songs from the album were all new “From the Vault” tracks:

#1 — “Is It Over Now?”
#2 — “Now That We Don't Talk”
#3 — “Slut!”
#5 — “Say Don't Go”

The fifth vault track, “Suburban Legends,” reached #10.

That makes perfect sense to me.

Those songs gave people an actual reason to explore the album. They were new Taylor Swift songs associated with the 1989 era that people hadn't heard before.

Then the familiar re-recordings came along for the ride.

“Bad Blood (TV)” reached #7. “Style (TV)” reached #9. “Blank Space (TV)” reached #12. “Out of the Woods (TV)” reached #16. “Wildest Dreams (TV)” reached #19. Even “All You Had to Do Was Stay (TV),” whose original recording had never reached the Top 20, made it to #20.

That's an extraordinary level of saturation.

Lots of superstars can album-bomb the Hot 100 with new music.

Taylor Swift had reached a point where she could album-bomb it with an album consisting largely of re-recordings of songs millions of people had already been able to hear for nine years.

“Blank Space (TV)” then went:

#12 → #59 → #93 → out.

That's about as clean an album-bomb trajectory as you're ever going to see.

I don't think America suddenly decided in November 2023 that it needed “Blank Space” back in heavy rotation.

People were consuming 1989 (Taylor's Version) as an event, and “Blank Space (TV)” was part of the package.

Replacement hits

There is another statistical oddity here.

Taylor Swift has managed something almost nobody in the modern Billboard era has done repeatedly: she has put new recordings of her own old hits back into the Top 20.

Nine Taylor's Version recordings in my database qualify for what I'm going to call replacement hits: the original recording reached the Top 20, and then Swift's substantially similar re-recording independently reached the Top 20 too.

They are:

“Love Story”
“State of Grace”
“Back to December”
“Mine”
“Bad Blood”
“Blank Space”
“Out of the Woods”
“Style”
“Wildest Dreams”

Eight of the nine Taylor's Version replacements peaked lower than their originals.

The lone exception is “Out of the Woods.” The OV peaked at #18; TV reached #16.

That one might be fun if the randomizer ever gives it to me.

Outside Swift, I found only one similarly clean post-1955 example in my eligible pool: the Righteous Brothers' 1990 re-recording of “Unchained Melody.”

I'm going to leave that story alone too. Both versions remain potential future draws.

But nine examples from one artist is remarkable.

It says something about the Taylor's Version project, but I think it says even more about the sheer size and engagement of Taylor Swift's audience.

Did anybody actually need a new “Blank Space”?

This was the question I kept returning to.

I understand why Taylor Swift needed “Blank Space (TV)” to exist.

At the time, she didn't own the original master. Creating a replacement master gave her an asset she controlled and gave listeners an alternative that could redirect consumption toward that asset.

Some fans cared about that distinction enough to deliberately choose Taylor's Version.

Even radio became part of the substitution effort. In 2021, iHeartRadio announced that its stations would replace Swift's earlier recordings with Taylor's Versions as the new recordings became available.

That's pretty remarkable when you think about it.

They weren't necessarily treating “Love Story (TV)” as some exciting new single.

They were essentially saying:

When we want to play “Love Story,” we'll use this master instead.

That's substitution.

But what about me?

As a listener, do I need TV?

There was only one way to find out.

I listened.

The highly scientific Blank Space experiment

I started with “Blank Space (TV)” and listened to it about six times.

My first reaction was that it sounded like “Blank Space.”

That's not sarcasm. I mean I could barely identify anything that separated it from my memory of OV.

The structure was the same. The lyrics were the same. Nothing jumped out as a deliberate reinterpretation. The line “I can make the bad guys good for a weekend” sounded maybe a little different to me, but even that was extremely slight.

Mostly, I found myself thinking:

This is a catchy song. I remember why I liked this.

Then I listened to the 2014 OV.

Taylor's voice seemed a little thinner on the original. The TV vocal sounded slightly fuller to me.

But we're talking about a tiny difference.

I still wasn't confident I could reliably tell them apart.

Then I found one of the greatest tools ever created for people who want to waste an unreasonable amount of time comparing two nearly identical Taylor Swift recordings:

Somebody on YouTube had put OV in one ear and TV in the other.

This was perfect.

Forget trying to remember what the snare sounded like four minutes ago. Now I could hear both recordings simultaneously.

Surely this would expose the differences.

And...

They're about 99 percent identical to my ears.

I thought I detected a slight lag between the recordings during the second verse. Even the “bad guys good for a weekend” line that I had noticed earlier was difficult to distinguish when the two performances were literally playing simultaneously in separate ears.

There are people with better-trained ears who hear more.

One review described “Blank Space (TV)” as compressing its backing instrumental a few increments less tightly than the original and argued that this hurt the momentum of Swift's vocal performance.

I trust that there are technical production differences between these recordings.

But I also think we're getting into some pretty serious hair-splitting.

I'm not a producer.

I'm not a sound engineer.

I'm essentially just a guy who likes songs and likes thinking about their place in popular culture.

And after listening to these two recordings repeatedly, sequentially, and finally at the same time in different ears, I can't identify a difference that meaningfully changes my experience of the song.

That's actually impressive.

Recreating Max Martin without Max Martin

There's one production detail that makes that 99-percent result even more interesting.

“Blank Space” was written by Swift with Max Martin and Shellback, who produced the original recording with her.

Martin and Shellback did not return to reproduce “Blank Space” for 1989 (Taylor's Version). The new recording was produced by Swift and Christopher Rowe.

So they were trying to recreate a record strongly associated with two of the most successful pop craftsmen of their era without those craftsmen actually making the new recording.

And to my ears, they got astonishingly close.

The objective wasn't to reinvent “Blank Space.”

It was to make another “Blank Space.”

Mission accomplished.

So does it need to exist?

That leaves me with the two questions I've really been asking all along.

Is “Blank Space (TV)” a good song?

Yes.

I like it quite a bit. It's catchy, it works, and six consecutive listens didn't make me sick of it. That's a pretty decent test by itself.

Does “Blank Space (TV)” need to exist?

From my perspective as a casual listener?

Not really.

I completely understand why Taylor Swift wanted it to exist. I understand why her fans supported the project. And after looking into the masters story, I understand the business logic behind creating a replacement recording.

But none of that gives me much reason to prefer TV to OV.

I could listen to either one and be equally happy.

And importantly, that doesn't reduce my enjoyment of TV.

I'm not going to deduct points because another almost-identical recording already exists.

Likewise, I'm not going to add points because Taylor owned this master and didn't own the other one at the time.

I'm rating what comes out of the speakers.

And what comes out of the speakers sounds an awful lot like a song I already thought was pretty good.

If the original “Blank Space” eventually comes out of the randomizer, maybe I'll end up giving it exactly the same score. Based purely on today's listening, I don't have enough evidence to claim confidently that one recording is better than the other.

Taylor's voice sounds a little fuller on TV.

Beyond that?

Ask a sound engineer.

Rating: 66/100

Quite a bit above average for me, but not quite in favorite territory.

And someday, if the randomizer gives me the 2014 OV, we can finally talk about what “Blank Space” is actually about.

Today, the more interesting question was why we wound up with two almost indistinguishable versions of it in the first place.

Epilogue: She got them back

There is one final twist to the Taylor's Version story.

In May 2025, Swift announced that she had purchased the masters to her first six albums from Shamrock Capital.

She got them back.

Which means Taylor Swift now owns the master to the 2014 OV of “Blank Space.”

And she owns the master to the 2023 TV.

The problem that the Taylor's Version project was designed to solve was eventually solved another way: she bought the original recordings.

That leaves the Taylor's Version project in an interesting state.

Of the six original Big Machine albums, four received complete Taylor's Version releases: Fearless, Red, Speak Now and 1989.

The two missing albums are her self-titled debut and Reputation.

When Swift announced the purchase in 2025, she said that she had completely re-recorded the debut album, although she hadn't finished the artwork. Reputation was a different story: she said she had re-recorded less than a quarter of it and had found it difficult to recreate an album so tied to a particular moment in her life. She left open the possibility that material from both projects could eventually appear.

So the Taylor's Version project isn't officially dead.

But it certainly seems to be on some kind of indefinite hiatus, and the business urgency that created it is gone.

She doesn't need to create replacement masters anymore.

She owns the originals.

Which leaves “Blank Space (TV)” as an artifact of a very particular moment: a recording created to replace something its artist didn't own, which its artist eventually wound up owning anyway.