By now you may have heard, Taylor Swift’s new album, 1989, which released for iTunes on October 24th and in record stores on October 31st, has become the fastest-selling album in the last 12 years. It topped the Billboard 200 chart in the US, selling 1.287 million copies in its first week of release, a record that dwarfs all of last week’s 70 biggest-selling albums in the US combined.

At the young age of 24, Taylor Swift has become the first artist to achieve three albums that have sold more than a million copies in the first seven days of release, Speak Now (2010), Red(2012) and 1989 (2014).

1989 has become 2014’s second largest-selling album in the US, just behind the Frozen soundtrack, which has sold 3.2 million copies this year. Though do keep in mind, this is only it’s first week!

Okay, but these are just numbers, what really makes Taylor Swift’s new and fifth studio album so incredible? Well, for one, it turned her acoustic country pop into a vividly diverse powerhouse pop production. The album is titled after the year she was born, for a good reason, as the late 80’s saw the rise of a variety of popular music that still lingers in our nostalgia today. Taylor herself has expressed that artists in the late eighties “made the most incredible, bold, risky decisions as far as pop music goes. They were really ahead of their time.” And she couldn’t wait to approach the same kind of transformation.

In November 2013, a year after her impossibly successful album, Red, she told Billboard that, “There are probably seven or eight [songs] that I know I want on the [next] record. It’s already evolved into a new sound, and that’s all I wanted.”

For the best of the pop sound Taylor needed the best of the pop producers. Her team immediately included the likes of Max Martin (producer behind the initial success of Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, N’Sync and Pink), Shellback (songwriter/producer behind the continuous success of Kesha, Pink and Avril Lavigne, among others), Jack Antonoff (guitarist for the band Fun) and Ryand Tedder (frontman and the creative brain behind all of Onerepublic’s, and a whole lot more popular contemporary, hits).

With a strong creative team behind her, Taylor was able to turn her dynamic melodies, syllabic writing styles and quirky deliveries into a whole album of musical kaleidoscope that made her much-publicized and chart-successful “Shake It Off” seem like a piece of welcome fluff. The first four tracks, from “Welcome to New York”, “Blank Space”, “Style”, “Out of the Woods”, “All You Had to Do Was Stay” leading all the way up to “Shake It Off”, were all carved masterfully out of Taylor’s creative talent, crystalized meticulously by a host of veteran producers and energized into a series of electrifying tracks. Each one gets better and more diverse than the previous as you venture further and deeper into Taylor’s new transformation. And should you choose to buy the deluxe edition, there are three bonus tracks where Taylor explains her creative processes and how the songs were eventually refined into their final productions.

At her fifth album, 1989, Taylor continues to grow, transform, and pioneer new horizons in music. But she surely isn’t going to stop there. As this “Love Story” hit maker has previously expressed, she may even be looking at exploring a career writing poetry and possibly publishing books. Let’s just hope that her writing skills are better than the quirky dance moves she exhibited in the “Shake It Off” MV.