It was a business deal that led to one of the most ambitious recording projects in pop: When Taylor Swift’s catalog was sold in 2019 as part of a larger acquisition of Nashville, Tennessee, record company Big Machine, she said she would redo all of the affected albums to maintain some control over her creative work.
Now the original recordings are hers again.
On Friday, Swift announced on her website that she had bought her masters back from Shamrock Capital, the Los Angeles-based investment firm that was founded by Roy E. Disney, a nephew of Walt Disney. She did not disclose the price.
“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,” she wrote to fans. “The best things that have ever been mine … finally actually are.”
In her statement, Swift said she now had ownership of all of her music videos, concert films, album art and photography and unreleased songs.
Shamrock acquired the rights to Swift’s first six albums — “Taylor Swift” (2006), “Fearless” (2008), “Speak Now” (2010), “Red” (2012), “1989” (2014)” and “Reputation” (2017) — in 2020 from Scooter Braun, the music manager who shepherded Justin Bieber’s career and had worked with longtime Swift adversary Kanye West, and his company Ithaca Holdings.
Braun’s 2019 deal for the Big Machine Label Group, founded by Scott Borchetta and also home to country artists such as Florida Georgia Line, Rascal Flatts and Thomas Rhett, was estimated at $300 million. Shamrock paid more than $300 million for Swift’s catalog, according to a person briefed on the deal.
In 2018, Swift signed a new deal with Universal Music Group and its subsidiary, Republic Records. She owns the master recordings made under that agreement, including for the albums “Lover” (2019), “Folklore” (2020), “Evermore” (2020), “Midnights” (2022) and “The Tortured Poets Department” from last year.
Recording artists frequently do not own their own masters and therefore cannot fully leverage their recordings, whether by selling albums or by licensing songs for movies or video games. While artists do earn royalties regardless, owning a master brings greater income and control. (Copyrights for songwriting are separate.)
The Braun deal “stripped me of my life’s work,” Swift wrote when the initial purchase was made public, and left her back catalog “in the hands of someone who tried to dismantle it.”
“For years I asked, pleaded for a chance to own my work,” Swift added then. “Instead I was given an opportunity to sign back up to Big Machine Records and ‘earn’ one album back at a time, one for every new one I turned in. I walked away because I knew once I signed that contract, Scott Borchetta would sell the label, thereby selling me and my future.”
According to a note Swift posted on social media at the time of the Shamrock sale, she was given an opportunity to be a “partner” with the company but turned it down because Braun’s deal would let him continue to profit from her work.
Swift then began a painstaking process of making new recordings of those old albums and releasing them as “Taylor’s Version.”
She put out the first one, a rerecording of her second album called “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” in 2021; Taylor’s Versions of “Red,” “Speak Now” and “1989” followed. Her remake of “1989” had a larger opening week than the original LP, debuting on the Billboard 200 chart with the equivalent of 1,653,000 sales in the United States, which was at that point the biggest opening week of her career. (She topped it with “The Tortured Poets Department” a year later.)
In her note to fans Friday, she addressed the final two LPs in the project, her self-titled debut and “Reputation.” The self-titled album, she said, has been fully rerecorded, “and I really love how it sounds now.” Work on “Reputation,” however, stalled. It “was so specific to that time in my life,” she wrote, “and I kept hitting a stopping point when I tried to remake it.” She said there were no firm plans to release either record but that she was leaving the option open.
Swift said that her fans’ embrace of the rerecordings “and the success story you turned the Eras Tour into is why I was able to buy back my music.” The tour, which led to a Ticketmaster debacle, a run on friendship bracelets and 21 months of nearly nonstop media coverage, sold more than $2 billion in tickets over its 149 shows.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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