Taylor Swift buys again the masters for her first 6 albums : NPR

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.

“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 an announcement. “But that’s all in the past now.”

The official, unique recordings of Swift’s first six albums had been acquired by personal fairness agency Shamrock Capitol in 2020. The agency purchased the masters from music supervisor and government Scooter Braun, who had purchased them in 2019 when he acquired Swift’s first label, Big Machine Label Group.

Among major-label artists, it is not unusual for the document 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. But when Braun acquired Swift’s masters in 2019, the pop star spoke out publicly with disapproval concerning the sale.

“This is my worst case scenario,” the artist wrote in a Tumblr put up on the time, saying she’d suspected for a while that Big Machine head Scott Borchetta was planning to promote 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 he or she 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 an announcement that the 2 events had been working collectively 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 finally 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 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 Version), a recreation of her 2008 smash, and persevering with with Red (Taylor’s Version), Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) and 1989 (Taylor’s Version).

In Swift’s announcement about buying her masters, she says that the remaining two albums she’d deliberate to launch as re-recordings — Reputation and her self-titled debut — “can still have their moments to re-emerge when the time is right.”