Taylor Swift has bought back the master recordings to her first six albums, giving her control over her entire catalogue for the first time.
She originally lost the rights in 2019 when her first record label, Big Machine, sold them to music executive Scooter Braun. Swift described the sale to Braun as her “worst case scenario”, and said she had not been given the opportunity to buy her work outright, but to “earn” one album back for each new album she recorded for the label. Her subsequent albums, from 2019’s Lover onwards, were released on Republic, with Swift retaining the rights to the master recordings.
Braun at one time managed Kanye West, who repeatedly targeted Swift after he infamously invaded her acceptance speech at the 2009 VMA awards. In November 2020, Braun sold the master recordings to the private equity firm Shamrock Capital in November for a reported $300 million.
In a letter to fans posted today, Swift said that she bought her masters back from Shamrock for a “fair” price. It is understood that previous rumours that it cost Swift between $600 million and $1 billion are inaccurately high.
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To regain control over her music after the original sale to Braun – and to devalue his investment – Swift embarked on a project to re-record all six albums, branding each one “(Taylor’s Version)” and adding “From the Vault” tracks from the original songwriting sessions that had not made it on to the original albums.
Between 2021-2023, Swift re-recorded her albums Fearless (originally released in 2008), Red (2012), Speak Now (2010) and 1989 (2014).
As the principal songwriter, she has the right to re-record the material and to block any use of the original recordings. Several re-recorded songs made their debuts in film and TV syncs: last week, the new version of Look What You Made Me Do – from the as-yet unreleased re-recording of 2017’s Reputation – appeared in the new series of The Handmaid’s Tale.
Reputation and Swift’s self-titled debut album, from 2006, are the only albums not to be re-recorded. Fans have been speculating as to their possible release dates for years, leaping on the colours of her outfits and what they perceive to be clues in her limited social media posts to deduce when they would appear.
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Now that Swift has reacquired her master recordings, there is less reason to proceed with the recordings. In her letter to fans, she asked their thoughts about whether she should go ahead with them, and said she would follow their lead.
One suspects she might anyway: not only is there a vast appetite for the From the Vault tracks for those albums, but the essential redundancy of the project is unlikely to thwart its potentially vast commercial impact. The four previously released recordings broke commercial and chart records for Swift: in the UK alone, 1989 (Taylor’s Version) clocked higher first-week combined streams and sales – 184,000 – than the original total of 90,000 a decade earlier.
The recordings were interspersed with a run of new, original recordings. Swift has released four albums since 2020: her lockdown sister records Folklore and Evermore (2020), as well as Midnights (2022) and The Tortured Poets Department (2024).
Swift’s monumentally successful catalogue was showcased on her Eras tour, which travelled the world between 2023-2024, became the first billion dollar-grossing tour, and eventually grossed more than $2 billion in total. The show was divided into album-specific segments, and updated when it hit Europe in 2024 to include a new Tortured Poets section. – Guardian
