Taylor Swift announced on Friday via her website that she had acquired the rights to her master recordings, which include previously released music, music videos, concert films and more.
"Right now my mind is just a slideshow. ... All the times I was thiiiiiiiiiiis close, reaching out for it, only for it to fall through. I almost stopped thinking it could ever happen, after 20 years of having the carrot dangled and yanked away," she wrote in a statement. "But that's all in the past now."
The official, original recordings of Swift's first six albums were acquired by private equity firm Shamrock Capitol in 2020. The firm bought the masters from music manager and executive Scooter Braun, who had bought them in 2019 when he acquired Swift's first label, Big Machine Label Group.
Among major-label artists, it's not uncommon for the record label to own master recordings; artists including Jay-Z and Rihanna have famously taken pains to buy back the masters for their early work. But when Braun acquired Swift's masters in 2019, the pop star spoke out publicly with disapproval about the sale.
"This is my worst case scenario," the artist wrote in a Tumblr post at the time, saying she'd suspected for some time that Big Machine head Scott Borchetta was planning to sell the label, and her catalog with it. "This is what happens when you sign a deal at fifteen to someone for whom the term 'loyalty' is clearly just a contractual concept."
Swift's contract with Big Machine had expired in 2018, and she alleged that the label had offered her the opportunity to buy back her masters if she re-signed a new contract and "earned" the early albums back, one for each new album recorded. The label responded in a statement that the two parties were working together on a "new type of deal for our streaming world that was not necessarily tied to 'albums' but more of a length of time." Swift ultimately signed a multi-album deal with Universal Music Group in late 2018.
The dispute over the masters ignited a years-long saga, which included Swift setting out to re-record all of her first six albums — since she still retained the copyright to her music and lyrics — beginning in 2021 with Fearless (Taylor's Version), a recreation of her 2008 smash, and continuing with Red (Taylor's Version), Speak Now (Taylor's Version) and 1989 (Taylor's Version).
In Swift's announcement about acquiring her masters, she says that the remaining two albums she'd planned to release as re-recordings — Reputation and her self-titled debut — "can still have their moments to re-emerge when the time is right."
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