If you’re a Swiftie like me, you know that this Friday is literally Christmas. We will officially be entering Taylor Swift’s re-recording era. After giving us two sister albums that took us into a whimsical, ethereal, folkloric land with her most ambitious and deep-cutting narratives, Taylor Swift is ready to embark on her long journey to regain ownership of her masters.
For anyone who has been listening to Taylor Swift’s music over the past decade, it was a monumental moment to hear once again, for the first time, the song that essentially shaped her career and made her breakthrough into the music realm. The new version of “Love Story”, is so different yet still the authentic Taylor Swift country sound we got back in 2008.
If you’ve been following the back and forth between Taylor versus Scott Borchetta and Scooter Braun, you know that this fight has been going on for years. We are now just seeing her pushing through to the other side. The main purpose in Taylor Swift regaining ownership of all her masters is so that SHE is the one in control of her art and reaps the benefits of the art she devoted the last decade of her life to.
In 2005, Taylor Swift signed to Big Machine Records, making her the first artist ever on this label. When she signed with Big Machine, she was only 16 signing a contract that would tie her down for the next decade. At 16, how much do you really know about contracts? When the deal was up in 2018, Taylor publicly switched to Republic Records and left Big Machine amicably with ownership of her first 6 masters. But everything changed when Big Machines label president, Scott Borchetta, sold all 6 masters to music manager Scooter Braun who then sold it and profited a reported $300 million.
Taylor Swift has publicly shown her disdain for Scooter Braun as he works closely with people in the industry that she has had problems with, such as Justin Bieber and Kanye West. However, this issue within the music industry and its quiet corporate schemes are not new, and many other musicians have fallen victim to it.
The difference is that Taylor Swift is actually doing something about it and is going out of her way to re-record all the masters that were taken from her and releasing them this year. This is a total genius power move, because not only will fans get to experience the feeling of hearing their favorite Taylor Swift songs for the first time again, but she will now be the complete owner of her lifelong work. On top of releasing all her masters, she’s taking it up a notch and releasing songs “from the vault,” which are songs that got scraped from the original albums for whatever reason.
Needless to say, right now is a great time to be a Swiftie and relive nostalgically the songs that shaped our upbringings more than a decade ago.