New York (AFP) – Pop sensation Taylor Swift, who was locked in a feud with record executives since 2019 over ownership of her music, has bought back the rights to her entire back catalog, she said Friday. “All of the music I’ve ever made … now belongs … to me,” she wrote on her website, after years of disputes over her first six albums, a number of which she rerecorded to create copies she owns herself.
“To say this is my greatest dream come true is actually being pretty reserved about it,” she wrote in the letter to her devoted followers. “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.” Those records included the award-winning “Reputation” and “Taylor Swift.” Swift bought back her masters from Shamrock Capital, an LA investment firm, for an undisclosed amount.
The re-recording power move came in the wake of public sparring with industry mogul Scooter Braun, her one-time manager whose company had purchased her previous label and gained a majority stake in her early work. He later sold Swift’s master rights to the private equity company.
– ‘This fight’ –
The situation left Swift publicly incensed: “I just feel that artists should own their work,” she said in 2019. “She’s a vocal advocate for artists’ rights,” Ralph Jaccodine, a professor at the Berklee College of Music, told AFP previously. “She’s built her own brand.” Before her public efforts to regain control of her work, Prince, George Michael, Jay-Z, and Kanye West all also fought for control of their masters — one-of-a-kind source material that dictate how songs are reproduced and sold — but none had gone so far as to re-record them completely.
The queen of pop, whose recent nearly two-year-long, $2 billion Eras tour shattered records, said that she was “heartened by the conversations this saga has reignited within my industry.” Swift’s lucrative tour, which wrapped last year, was a showbusiness sensation, and will have helped offset the costs of buying back her catalog. The 149 shows across the world typically clocked in at more than three hours long each. Tour tickets sold for sometimes exorbitant prices and drew in millions of fans, along with many more who didn’t get in and were willing to simply sing along from the parking lot.
“Every time a new artist tells me they negotiated to own their master recordings in their record contract because of this fight, I’m reminded of how important it was for all this to happen,” Swift said in her letter.
© 2024 AFP
