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This week, Taylor Swift’s 1989 debuted at no. 1 on the Billboard 200. And it didn’t just top the chart; her album scored the biggest debut since Adele’s 25 released in 2015.

This is an odd milestone considering that Swift released 1989 in October 2014—surely you recall the album’s ubiquitous millennial pop anthems “Blank Space,” “Bad Blood,” and “Shake It Off.” But that was the old 1989. The new 1989—the album that last week outperformed the streaming figures of the original release in the same period by more than 1,300 percent—is 1989 (Taylor’s Version). This is the latest of several such rerecordings, each debuting at no. 1 and each marketed as “Taylor’s Version,” hinting at the underlying vendetta that prompted dueling versions of these albums in the first place: Scooter Braun’s purchase of Big Machine for over $300 million in a secretive deal with the record label’s founder, Scott Borchetta, that incurred the wildly productive wrath of Swift.

Swift, Borchetta, and Braun have something of a convoluted history that’s crucial to understanding this whole mess. Swift previously tried—and failed—to buy her master recordings, as Borchetta preferred to price her masters into the terms of a new recording contract with Big Machine—terms Swift rejected. Swift says she assumed Borchetta would sell her back catalog once she left Big Machine for Universal Music Group. The issue is Braun, specifically. Swift says he brought her to tears with his “incessant, manipulative bullying” on more than one occasion, citing, for instance, his involvement in her humiliating feud with Kanye West. She’s also criticized Borchetta for orchestrating the deal despite knowing her history with Braun. Swift described her earlier music as being “beholden to men who had no part in creating it.”

Over a year after the acquisition, Braun sold the master rights of Swift’s first six albums to the investment firm Shamrock Capital, but—according to Swift—Braun still continues to profit from the recordings per the terms of the sale. So, Swift, possibly inspired by a tweet from Kelly Clarkson, began to rerecord and rerelease those six albums produced under Big Machine to reclaim her back catalog and excise Braun from her musical legacy. This was at once a deeply personal feud and a broader crusade for musicians’ rights. Taylor’s Versions were a peculiar gambit, the realization of a strategy devised a couple of decades earlier by Prince in his notorious campaign against Warner Bros. in the 1990s.

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