Unless you live under a rock, you’ve probably heard Taylor Swift's name more than often lately. Her fans have grown more and more crazed over the years, especially after she began to release her remastered “Taylor's Version” of her past songs and albums.
This began in early 2021 when she released “Love Story (Taylor's Version)”, the re-recording of her 2008 hit song. She then went on to release full re-recordings of her albums Fearless, Red, Speak Now, along with 1989 later this year.
These recent re-recordings have confused non-fans of the acclaimed singer as it has never been done by an artist before, at least not this early into their career. People who don’t follow her on social media speculate that she's just doing it for money, and while they aren’t entirely wrong, there’s still a lot more to the story.
In 2005, at the young age of 15, Swift signed a 13-year deal with Big Machine Records. What she didn’t know at the time was this deal allowed Big Machine to own the masters to everything she released.
She then went on to release 6 albums within that 13-year timeframe. When her deal ended in 2018, Swift begged the label to let her buy her masters back, but they didn’t want her money, they wanted her. The label told her that if she signed again, she would slowly earn the rights to her masters over time. Swift didn’t like this deal and instead signed with Republic Records, where she could own the masters to anything she released moving forward.
Things began to get even more heated after music manager Scooter Braun bought Big Machine Records in 2019, making him the new owner of Taylor Swift's masters. Swift was not happy with this news, as she believed him to be a hateful person after his association with Kanye West (Taylor Swift does not like Kanye West but that’s a story for another time).
Since Scooter Braun was making money off of her work, Swift knew she had to do something about it. This long string of events is what eventually led to “Taylor's Version”, which allowed Swift to make about 60% more than she was driving under Big Machine Records, as well as keeping the owners of her previous works from making money.
This story is a clear example of why the music industry sucks. I don’t know a whole lot about the logistics of it, but I think it’s common sense that people should own the rights to their own creations.
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