In a message shared on her website, Taylor Swift confirmed that she’s now in full control of her masters for her first six studio albums.
“I’m trying to gather my thoughts into something coherent, but right now my mind is just a slideshow,” she wrote in the note, which can be viewed in full here. “A flashback sequence of all the times I daydreamed about, wished for, and pined away for a chance to get to tell you this news. … All of the music I’ve ever made… now belongs… to me.”
In 2019, Swift lost the rights to her earlier catalogue when Big Machine, her former record label, sold them to Scooter Braun. She criticized the sale and described it as the “worst case scenario” for her. As she wrote in her new letter, though, she clarified that she’s now in full ownership of all of her material.
“All my music videos, all the concert films,” she added. “The album art and photography. The unreleased songs. The memories. The magic. The madness. Every single era. My entire life’s work. To say this is my greatest dream come true is actually being pretty reserved about it. To my fans, you know how important this has been to me—so much so that I meticulously re-recorded and released four of my albums, calling them ‘Taylor’s Version.'”
She addressed the future of the ‘Taylor’s Version’ project—which has seen her re-record and release Fearless, Red, Speak Now, and 1989—in the letter.
“I know, I know, what about [Reputation Taylor’s Version]?” she wrote. “Full transparency: I haven’t even re-recorded a quarter of it. The Reputation album was so specific to that time in my life, and I kept hitting a stopping point when I tried to remake it. … To be perfectly honest, it’s the one album in those first 6 that I thought couldn’t be improved upon by redoing it.”
She said that she’s already re-recorded her debut album, and she’ll consider releasing both that album and Reputation again, if it’s something fans are interested in. “But if it happens, it wouldn’t be from a place of sadness and longing for what I wish I could have,” she added. “It will just be a celebration now.”
She concluded the letter by thanking her fans for their encouragement and any artist who was inspired to retain ownership of their masters because of her plight. “Thanks to you and your goodwill, teamwork and encouragement, the best things that have ever been mine… finally actually are,” she wrote. Alongside the news, she shared a picture of her posing with vinyl editions of her first six records.
Swift purchased her masters from the private equity firm Shamrock Capital, which bought them from Braun in October 2020 for $405 million. Shamrock offered Swift an equity partnership, but she rejected it. Because she’s the principal songwriter of her material, she was able to re-record the albums and release them with full ownership.
It’s unclear how much Swift paid to get her masters back, but she described the price as “fair” in her letter.
