Last week, Taylor Swift announced some very happy news — she had acquired all the music she has ever made, including the master recordings to her first six albums, music videos, photos, concert films, album art and unreleased songs.
It cost her a reported US$360 million, but it was something she had pursued for a long time.
In a hand-written statement to her fans published on her website, the singer-songwriter said she was able to buy back the music from its owner, private equity firm Shamrock Capital, because of the sales from her rerecorded music (“Taylor’s Version”) and the success of the record-breaking Eras Tour.
“I can’t thank you enough for helping to reunite me with this art that I have dedicated my life to, but have never owned until now,” Swift wrote in her statement to her fans.
For the first time ever, she has total control over her entire catalogue.
“All I’ve ever wanted was the opportunity to work hard enough to be able to one day purchase my music outright with no strings attached, no partnership, with full autonomy,” she wrote.
“I almost stopped thinking it could ever happen, after 20 years of having the carrot dangled and then yanked away. But that’s all in the past now. All of the music I’ve ever made … now belongs … to me.”
“I will be forever grateful to everyone at Shamrock Capital for being the first people to ever offer this to me. The way they’ve handled every interaction we’ve had has been honest, fair and respectful. This was a business deal to them, but I really felt like they saw it for what it was to me: my memories and my sweat and my handwriting and my decades of dreams. I am endlessly thankful. My first tattoo might just be a huge shamrock in the middle of my forehead.”
Why didn’t Swift own the catalogue to her original six albums?
In 2005, at the age of 15, Swift signed with her first label, Big Machine. The 13-year deal required her to forfeit the rights to her master recordings to the company. In 2019, label head Scott Borchetta sold the six albums she had recorded to music executive Scooter Braun and his company Ithaca Holdings — a decision that left Swift feeling sad and grossed out.
In a Tumblr post, she explained that she left Big Machine and signed with Universal Music Group because she knew that re-signing with Big Machine would only result in her not owning her future work.
“When I left my masters in (Big Machine Label Group founder Scott Borchetta’s) hands, I made peace with the fact that eventually he would sell them,” she wrote. “Never in my worst nightmares did I imagine the buyer would be Scooter.”
She claimed she was not offered the opportunity to buy her work outright, but forced to “earn” one album back for each new album she turned in for the label.
“I learned about Scooter Braun’s purchase of my masters as it was announced to the world,” she explained. “All I could think about was the incessant, manipulative bullying I’ve received at his hands for years.”
In November 2020, Braun sold the master recordings to Shamrock Capital for a reported US$300m. To regain control over her catalogue after the original sale to Braun, Swift went about rerecording all six albums, titling each one “(Taylor’s Version)” and adding “From the Vault” tracks from the original songwriting sessions that didn’t make it on to the original albums.
Between 2021 and 2023, she rerecorded and released four versions of her albums, including Fearless (originally released in 2008), Red (2012), Speak Now (2010) and 1989 (2014). Fans flocked to buying these new rerecorded versions, thus devaluing the price of the originals. They broke commercial and chart records.
The songs have their own intellectual property rights attached and as the principal songwriter, she holds the right to rerecord the material and to block any use of the original recordings. She also she receives a greater percentage of the income from the downloads, streams and licensing.
Only two of her albums have not been rerecorded and released: “Reputation” and Swift’s 2006 self-titled debut album. Now that she has reacquired her master recordings, there is perhaps less reason for her to do any rerecordings, but she did tell her fans that she has rerecorded her debut.
“I really love how it sounds now,” she wrote in her latest letter to fans. “Those two albums can still have their moments to re-emerge when the time is right, if that would be something you guys would be excited about. But if it happens, it won’t be from a place of sadness and longing for what I wish I could have. It will just be a celebration now.”
“I know, I know. What about Rep TV?” she wrote continued. “Full transparency: I haven’t even rerecorded a quarter of it. The Reputation album was so specific to that time in my life, and I kept hitting a stopping point when I tried to remake it.”
Reputation was released in November 2017, during a time when Swift’s public image was being lacerated by media scrutiny with accusations of overexposure and a feud with Kanye West.
During her 2023 TIME Person of the Year interview, she reflected on that era as a “goth-punk moment of female rage at being gaslit by an entire social structure.”
Commenting on that phase in her career last week in her letter, she added: “All that defiance, that longing to be understood while feeling purposely misunderstood, that desperate hope, that shame-born snarl and mischief. To be perfectly honest, it’s the one album in those first six that I thought couldn’t be improved upon by redoing it. Not the music, or photos, or videos. So I kept putting it off.”
Advocating for artists’ rights over their music
Swift concluded her letter by emphasising the importance of artist rights over their own original music.
“Every time a new artist tells me they negotiated to own their master recordings in their record contract because of this fight, I’m reminded of how important it was for all of this to happen,” she said.
“Thank you for being curious about something that used to be thought of as too industry-centric for broad discussion. You’ll never know how much it means to me that you cared. Every single bit of it counted and ended us up here.”
“To say this is my greatest dream come true is actually being pretty reserved about it. All I’ve ever wanted was the opportunity to work hard enough to be able to one day purchase my music outright with no strings attached, no partnership, with full autonomy.”
Swift has frequently stressed the need for artists to maintain control over their work and to receive fair compensation. In 2020, after winning Apple Music’s Songwriter of the Year, she said that artists should always own their master records and licence them back to the label for a limited time.
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