Taylor Swift has bought back all the rights to her master recordings – but has suggested she won’t be re-releasing her Reputation album.
“All the music I’ve ever made now belongs to me,” the star announced on her official website.
“I’ve been bursting tears of joy… ever since I found out this is really happening.”2
The popstar had originally lost the rights to her first six albums in 2019 when her first record label, Big Machine, sold them to music executive Scooter Braun.
After she learned Braun had acquired her musical catalogue, she opened up about it in a lengthy Tumblr post, blaming him for being complicit in Kanye West’s “incessant, manipulative bullying” of her.
Swift said she was not given the opportunity to buy her work outright, and so, in a bid to diminish the value of the master tapes, she set about re-recording them.
She had re-released four “Taylor’s Version” albums to date. Just her debut and Reputation remained.
Braun later sold his stake in her albums to Shamrock Holdings, a Los Angeles investment fund, in a deal reported to be worth £222 million.
It is not known how much Swift paid Shamrock to re-acquire the rights to her songs.
Swift said she was “forever grateful” to Shamrock for allowing her to buy the rights to her music back.
“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,” Swift wrote on her website.
“I am endlessly thankful. My first tattoo might just be a huge shamrock in the middle of my forehead.”
What it means for Reputation fans
Just two albums remained to be re-released by Swift: Debut and Reputation. The latter was a particularly strong source of speculation among fans, who would look for clues in her outfits during her record-breaking Era’s tour.
But this announcement could spell the end of that.
“Full transparency: I haven’t even re-recorded a quarter of it,” Swift said.
Reputation was “so specific” to a certain time in her life, and she said she kept hitting a block when she tried to re-record it, and she felt it was the first album she could not improve by re-recording it.
Debut has been re-recording, with Swift saying she “loves how it sounds now”.
But both albums could still “re-emerge when the time is right”, particularly the unreleased tracks.
“If it happens, it won’t be from a place of sadness and longing for what I wish I could have,” she said.
How Swift’s stance changed the music industry
In the music industry, the owner of a master controls all rights to exploit the recording. This means they can distribute it to new streaming services, create box sets, or license the songs to movies or games.
Swift, as co-writer of her music, had always maintained publishing rights, which meant she had been able to veto attempts to license the songs.
“I do want my music to live on. I do want it to be in movies. I do want it to be in commercials. But I only want that if I own it,” she told Billboard in 2019.
Swift said today she had been “heartened by the conversations this saga had reignited within my industry among artists and fans”.
“Every time a new artists tells me they negotiated to own their master recordings in their record contract because of this right, I’m reminded of how important it was for all of this to happen.”
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