Taylor Swift shocked fans on Friday by announcing her latest unprecedented power move: buying back her original master recordings, giving her full ownership of her musical catalog for the first time in her career.
“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, 35, wrote on her website.
“To say this is my greatest dream come true is actually being pretty reserved about it,” she added.
Indeed, Swift was so adamant that music should belong to its creators — especially in her case as a diaristic songwriter who signed her first record contract at age 15 — that she embarked on the ambitious process to rerecord her first six albums after her masters were acquired by Scooter Braun in 2019. (Braun sold Swift’s back catalog to Shamrock Capital, a private-equity firm, in 2020 for a reported $300 million.)
Swift’s ambitious rerecording plan wasn’t entirely without precedent, but it had never been attempted on such a broad scale. At first, it was met with plenty of skepticism from journalists and industry experts.
“A real fan knows the difference, and will never accept it,” a Forbes columnist wrote, referring to the rerecorded versions of Swift’s beloved songs.
Even Swift herself wasn’t immediately on board. “I’d look at them and go, ‘How can I possibly do that?'” she reflected in 2023. “Nobody wants to redo their homework.”
And yet, even without unanimous support from the industry, the “Taylor’s Version” series became a wild success, partially thanks to their “vault tracks.” To prove her point that only the artist knows the full story of her work — and, of course, to incentivize fans to stream and buy albums they’ve already heard — Swift shrewdly included never-before-heard songs that had originally been left on the cutting room floor.
Swift released the project’s first two installments in 2021, “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” and “Red (Taylor’s Version),” which yielded a No. 1 hit in the long-awaited “All Too Well (10 Minute Version)” and three Grammy nominations. These were followed by “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)” and “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” in 2023. The latter sold 1,653,000 copies in its first week, surpassing the original, and spawned yet another No. 1 hit in the fan-favorite vault track, “Is It Over Now?”
Fans have been clamoring for the remaining installments, “Taylor Swift (Taylor’s Version)” and “Reputation (Taylor’s Version),” for literal years now. A common refrain in online Swiftie communities is that “all she has left to reclaim is her name and reputation.”
Now, that reclamation is moot. There’s no longer any reason (moral, financial, or otherwise) for Swift to complete the “Taylor’s Version” project.
In her Friday announcement, Swift even admitted that she’s yet to finish rerecording “Reputation,” despite months of drumming up anticipation and dropping apparent Easter eggs.
“To be perfectly honest, it’s the one album in those first 6 that I thought couldn’t be improved upon by redoing it,” Swift wrote. “Not the music, or photos, or videos. So I kept putting it off.”
Swift did tease the existence of “Reputation” vault tracks, and she also confirmed “Taylor Swift (Taylor’s Version)” is ready to go — but declined to give fans a firm promise or timeline for their release.
“If it happens,” she hedged, “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.”
Like most things that Swift does, this move is bound to be met with mixed reactions. Some Swifties may even be angry about how much they’ve invested in supporting the “Taylor’s Version” albums, mostly on principle, only for the endeavor to render itself redundant.
However, that’s not to say the venture was a bust. In fact, the passionate fan response likely gave Swift important leverage in her negotiations with Shamrock; the more that Swifties insisted on listening to “Taylor’s Version” albums and shunning the so-called “stolen versions,” the less valuable those original recordings became. (In the year after its release, for example, “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” sold 1 million equivalent album units, while the original “Fearless” sold 242,000.)
Moreover, as Swift noted in her announcement, the impact of “Taylor’s Version” is already causing ripple effects across the music industry. While it’s rare for musicians to own their masters — especially big stars like Swift, who typically sign major label deals that forfeit their masters in exchange for bigger budgets and wider reach — labels are spooked.
In 2023, top music attorneys told Billboard that many are overhauling contracts to prevent artists from rerecording their music down the line, Swift-style. Whether or not their efforts pan out, Swift’s peers are now better prepared for the challenge. Her showdown with Braun alerted newer artists to the dangers of overreaching contracts — and inspired many, like Olivia Rodrigo, to maintain control of their masters from a young age.
The “Taylor’s Version” series may never conclude in the way Swifties had imagined, but then again, keeping the industry on its toes is what Swift does best.
“I’m extremely heartened by the conversations this saga has reignited within my industry among artists and fans,” Swift wrote on Friday. “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.”
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