Taylor Swift with her first six albums. – Credit: TAS Rights Management
Taylor Swift has regained control of her recorded music catalog six years after her old label, Big Machine Label Group, sold it to Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings. The singer announced the purchase in a lengthy letter, writing, “All of the music I’ve ever made now belongs to me.“
Swift announced the news this morning with a note to fans on her website, as well as a handful of photos on Instagram showing her with vinyl copies of her original records. “You belong with me,” she captioned the post.
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The deal, as Swift wrote, covers not just the rights to her music, including unreleased tunes, but all of her music videos, concert films, album art, photography, and unreleased songs. And there are, of course, equally meaningful, more ephemeral aspects of the deal: “The memories. The magic. The madness,” Swift wrote. “Every single era. My entire life’s work.”
It’s unclear how much the deal is worth, but a source tells Rolling Stone that a previously reported price range of close to $600 million, which emerged when rumors of the sale first started circulating, was “highly inaccurate.”
In her letter, Swift said that calling regaining control over her catalog her “greatest dream come true” was “actually being pretty reserved about it.” She thanked her fans for all their support, suggesting that the massive success of the Eras Tour and efforts to rerecord her old albums made it possible for her to buy back her music.
“I can’t thank you enough for helping to reunite me with this art that I have dedicated my life to, but never owned until now,” she wrote. “All I’ve ever wanted was the opportunity to work hard enough to be able to one day purchase my music outright with no strings attached, no partnership, with full autonomy.”
Swift went on to say that she was grateful to Shamrock Capital — which has owned the rights to her catalog since 2020 — for “being the first people to ever offer this to me,” saying their handling of the deal was “honest, fair, and respectful.”
A source close to the contract negotiations also pushed back against what was described as a “previous false report” that there was an “outside party” — Braun — who was encouraging the sale back to Swift. “All rightful credit for this opportunity should go to the partners at Shamrock Holdings and Taylor’s Nashville-based management team only,” the source said. “Taylor now owns all of her music, and this moment finally happened in spite of Scooter Braun, not because of him.”
Braun, in a statement shared with Rolling Stone, said, “I am happy for her.”
Ithaca’s 2019 acquisition of Big Machine launched one of the most fascinating music industry sagas in recent years. While Big Machine owned the rights to music by an array of top country acts (Reba McEntire, Midland, and Sugarland, to name a few), Swift’s first six albums were arguably the crown jewels, and a major reason the sale was valued at around $300 million.
By the time Ithaca acquired Big Machine in summer 2019, Swift had already left the label and signed with Universal Music Group (the deal included provisions that would allow her to retain control of her master recordings). As Swift wrote in a blog post at the time, she was aware that, after leaving Big Machine, CEO Scott Borchetta was likely to sell the label — but she never expected Braun to be the buyer.
In that same post, Swift highlighted her contentious history with Braun, largely via his work with her longtime foe, Kanye West. She claimed, for instance, that Braun got West and Justin Bieber “to bully” her online amid the fracas over the leaked phone call regarding a lyric about Swift in West’s song “Famous.”
Swift said she was “sad and grossed out” over the deal, and claimed that any time Borchetta heard her speak Braun’s name, “it was when I was either crying or trying not to.”
On top of all that, though, was Swift’s desire to simply own the rights to her catalog. “For years I asked, pleaded for a chance to own my work,” she wrote. “Instead I was given an opportunity to sign back up to Big Machine Records and ‘earn’ one album back at a time, one for every new one I turned in. I walked away because I knew once I signed that contract, Scott Borchetta would sell the label, thereby selling me and my future. I had to make the excruciating choice to leave behind my past.”
Within a few months of the sale, Swift began teasing her ambitious response: She would rerecord her first six albums, thereby reclaiming some control over the music, while ostensibly diluting the value of the original recordings. In 2021, she launched her Taylor’s Version campaign with rerecords of Fearless and Red, both of which were followed in 2023 by Speak Now and 1989. (Along with new versions of the original albums, the projects also included an array of previously unreleased tunes now known as “vault tracks,” which were also rerecorded.)
As for the future of that project, Swift said in her letter today that her 2006 self-titled debut has been “completely re-recorded,” adding, “I really love how it sounds now.” But her rerecord of 2017’s Reputation is far from complete — “I haven’t even re-recorded a quarter of it” — and Swift admitted she wasn’t sure if she would ever finish 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,” she said. “All that defiance, that longing to be understood while feeling purposely misunderstood, that desperate hope, that shame-born snarl and mischief. To be perfectly honest, it’s the one album in those first six that I thought couldn’t be improved upon by redoing it. Not the music, or photos, or videos. So I kept putting it off.”
Swift went on to say she may share the unreleased Reputation “vault tracks” at some point, but didn’t give any release details. Nor did she share when the rerecord of Taylor Swift would see the light of day.
“Those 2 albums can still have their moments to reemerge when the time is right, if that would be something you guys would be excited about,” she said. “But if it happens, it won’t be from a place of sadness and longing for what I wish I could have. It will just be a celebration now.”
Before Swift had originally begun the rerecord project though, her catalog changed hands again. Just over a year after the Big Machine acquisition, Braun’s Ithaca Holdings sold Swift’s catalog to Shamrock Capital in a deal reportedly worth over $300 million. Prior to that sale, Swift revealed, she’d been trying to get back control of her masters, but claimed that Braun’s team was, as part of the deal, demanding she sign “an ironclad NDA” that would prevent her from speaking negatively about him. Swift also said she considered partnering with Shamrock until she found out that the deal terms would still result in Braun profiting off her old recordings for “a very long time.”
Braun, for his part, later expressed some regret over his handling of the Big Machine acquisition and Swift catalog sale. In a 2022 interview on NPR’s The Limits podcast, he admitted to coming from “a place of arrogance,” assuming that he and Swift could work things out. “The regret I have there is that I made the assumption that everyone, once the deal was done, was going to have a conversation with me, see my intent, see my character and say, great, let’s be in business together,” he said. “And I made that assumption with people that I didn’t know.”
Swift concluded her note today by mentioning a massive positive that has come from this saga: The attention it’s brought to the hurdles that artists face in trying to control and own their creative output.
“Every time a new artist tells me they negotiated to own their master recordings in their record contract because of this flight, I’m reminded of how important it was for all of this to happen,” Swift wrote. “Thank you for being curious about something that used to be thought of as too industry-centric for brand discussion. You’ll never know how much it means to me that you cared. Every single bit of it counted and ended us up here.”
This story was updated at 1:24 p.m. ET with a statement from Braun.
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