Taylor Swift in February 2025, on the 67th Grammy Awards.
Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Pictures for the Recording Academy
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Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Pictures for the Recording Academy
Taylor Swift introduced on Friday through her web site that she had acquired the rights to her grasp recordings, which embrace beforehand launched music, music movies, live performance movies and extra.
“Proper now my thoughts is only a slideshow. … All of the occasions I used to be thiiiiiiiiiiis shut, reaching out for it, just for it to fall by. I virtually stopped considering it might ever occur, after 20 years of getting the carrot dangled and yanked away,” she wrote in a press release. “However that is all prior to now now.”
The official, unique recordings of Swift’s first six albums have been acquired by personal fairness agency Shamrock Capitol in 2020. The agency purchased the masters from music supervisor and govt Scooter Braun, who had purchased them in 2019 when he acquired Swift’s first label, Huge Machine Label Group.
Amongst major-label artists, it is not unusual for the report label to personal grasp recordings; artists together with Jay-Z and Rihanna have famously taken pains to purchase again the masters for his or her early work. However when Braun acquired Swift’s masters in 2019, the pop star spoke out publicly with disapproval concerning the sale.
“That is my worst case state of affairs,” the artist wrote in a Tumblr put up on the time, saying she’d suspected for a while that Huge Machine head Scott Borchetta was planning to promote the label, and her catalog with it. “That is what occurs once you signal a deal at fifteen to somebody for whom the time period ‘loyalty’ is clearly only a contractual idea.”
Swift’s contract with Huge Machine had expired in 2018, and she or he alleged that the label had supplied her the chance to purchase again her masters if she re-signed a brand new contract and “earned” the early albums again, one for every new album recorded. The label responded in a press release that the 2 events have been working collectively on a “new kind of deal for our streaming world that was not essentially tied to ‘albums’ however extra of a size of time.” Swift in the end signed a multi-album deal with Common Music Group in late 2018.
The dispute over the masters ignited a years-long saga, which included Swift getting down to re-record all of her first six albums — since she nonetheless retained the copyright to her music and lyrics — starting in 2021 with Fearless (Taylor’s Model), a recreation of her 2008 smash, and persevering with with Crimson (Taylor’s Model), Converse Now (Taylor’s Model) and 1989 (Taylor’s Model).
In Swift’s announcement about buying her masters, she says that the remaining two albums she’d deliberate to launch as re-recordings — Fame and her self-titled debut — “can nonetheless have their moments to re-emerge when the time is true.”