Taylor Swift regains control of her music, buying back first 6 albums
Taylor Swift has regained control over her entire body of work.
In a lengthy note posted to her official website on Friday, Swift announced: "All of the music I've ever made now belongs to me."
"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 said, addressing her fans in the post. "The best things that have ever been mine... finally actually are."
The pop star said she purchased her catalogue of recordings — originally released through Big Machine Records — from their most recent owner, the private equity firm Shamrock Capital. She did not disclose the amount.
"We are thrilled with this outcome and are so happy for Taylor," Shamrock Capital said in a statement.
'Taylor's Version'Over the last few years, Swift has been re-recording and releasing her first six albums in an attempt to regain control of her music. She began that project after Scooter Braun's Ithaca Holdings purchased Big Machine records in 2019, which owned the masters of those early albums. It reignited a years-long feud between Braun and Swift, even after Ithaca sold her catalogue on to Shamrock for a reported $300 million US.
"This is my worst case scenario," Swift wrote of the deal at the time. "My musical legacy is about to lie in the hands of someone who tried to dismantle it."
She had previously accused Braun of harassing and bullying her for years, particularly alongside her long-running feud with rapper Ye.
Following the Shamrock sale, Swift continued to pursue strategies to re-obtain that catalogue, while also releasing her own versions of those early songs — the masters of which she then owned. But previous "Taylor's Version" releases have been more than conventional re-recordings, arriving with new "from the vault" music, Easter eggs and visuals that deepen understanding of her work.
Braun, now CEO of Hybe America, told the Hollywood Reporter Friday "I am happy for her," in response to the news.
In between re-recordings, she has released new music, including last year's The Tortured Poets Department, announced during the 2024 Grammys and released during her record-breaking tour.
So far, there have been four re-recorded albums, beginning with Fearless (Taylor's Version) and Red (Taylor's Version) in 2021. All four have been massive commercial and cultural successes, each one debuting at No. 1 on the Billboard 200.
Swift's last re-recording, 1989 (Taylor's Version), arrived in October 2023, just four months after the release of Speak Now (Taylor's Version). That was the same year Swift claimed the record for the woman with the most No. 1 albums in history.
Fans have theorized that Reputation (Taylor's Version) would be next: On May 19, Look What You Made Me Do (Taylor's Version) aired nearly in full during the opening scene of a Season 6 episode of The Handmaid's Tale.
Prior to that, the song was teased in 2023's Prime Video limited-series thriller Wilderness and in Apple TV+'s The Dynasty: New England Patriots in 2024. Also in 2023, she contributed Delicate (Taylor's Version) to Prime Video's The Summer I Turned Pretty.
But according to the note shared Friday, Swift says she hasn't "even re-recorded a quarter of it."
She did say, however, that she has completely rerecorded her self-titled debut album "and I really love how it sounds now."
Swift writes that both her self-titled debut and Reputation (Taylor's Version) "can still have their moments to re-emerge when the time is right."
Representatives for Swift and Hybe did not immediately respond to request for comment.
cbc.ca
