Taylor Swift resumed control of his musical catalog six years after his old label, Big Machine Label Group, sold him to the Ithaca Holdings in Scooter Braun. The singer announced the purchase in a long letter to his fans, writing on his website: “All the music I have done now belongs to me”. The Swift announced the news by publishing a series of shots on Instagram that portray it with the vinyl copies of its original records. The caption of the post reads: “You Belong with me”.
The agreement, as Swift wrote, covers not only the rights of his music – including unpublished songs – but also all his music videos, the movies of the concerts, the artwork of the albums, the photographs, the unpublished songs. And of course there are equally significant aspects: «Memories. Magic. Madness, “wrote Swift. «Every single was. The work of my whole life ».
It is not clear how much he spent, but a source said to Rolling Stone That the price close to the 600 million dollars that emerged when the first rumors about the sale began to circulate was “highly inaccurate”.
The acquisition of Big Machine by Ithaca in 2019 started one of the most fascinating sagas of the music industry in recent years. While Big Machine owned the musical rights of a series of prominent country artists (Reba Mcentire, Midland and Sugarland, to name a few), the first six albums by Taylor Swift were probably the most precious jewels of his crown and one of the main reasons why the sale was assessed about 300 million dollars.
When Ithaca acquired Big Machine in the summer of 2019, Swift had already left the label to sign with Universal Music Group (the agreement provided for provisions that would allow her to maintain control of her masters). As he wrote at the time in a post on his blog, Swift was aware that, after leaving Big Machine, the CEO Scott Borchetta would probably have sold the label, but would never have expected the buyer to be Scooter Braun.
In the same post, Swift underlined his conflicting history with Braun, largely because of his work with his longtime enemy, Kanye West. For example, he said that Braun made sure that West and Justin Bieber “Bullization” online during the quarrel for the driving phone with a text about a text concerning the pop star in the song Famous of West. Swift said he was “sad and disgusted” for the agreement and stating that every time Borchetta had heard her pronounce the name of Braun, “it was when I was crying”.
The most important thing was Swift's desire to own the rights of his catalog. “For years I have asked and implored to have the opportunity to own my job,” he wrote. «Instead I was given the opportunity to sign again for the Big Machine Records and to earn one album at a time, one for each new album I delivered. I left because I knew that once the contract has been signed, Scott Borchetta would sell the label, thus selling me and my future. I had to make the excruciating choice to leave my past behind me. Music I wrote on the floor of my bedroom and video that I dreamed and paid with the money earned by playing in the bars, then in the clubs, in the arenas, and finally in the stadiums ».
A few months after the sale, Swift began to ventilate his ambitious revenge: he would have re-recorded his first six albums, thus recovering some control over music and decreasing the value of the original recordings. In 2021 he launched the Taylor's Version with the re-registry of Fearless And Redfollowed in 2023 by Speak Now And 1989. (In addition to the new versions of the original albums, the projects also included a series of unpublished songs now known as Vault Tracksalso re-recorded).
The project of Taylor's Version Will it go on? Swift writes that the 2006 homonymous debut was “completely re-recorded” and that “I like it very much as it sounds now”. The awaited version of Reputation Of 2016, on the other hand, it is well long from being complete. «I have not even re-recorded a quarter, says Swift that it is not sure if it will never complete it.
“The album Reputation It is related to a very precise period of my life and I continued to run when I tried to do it again. That sense of challenge, the desire to be understood while I felt deliberately misunderstood, the desperate hope, the scream and the malice born from shame. To be completely honest, it is the only album among the first six that I thought could not be improved. Not the music, nor the photos, nor the videos, and therefore I kept postponing ».
Swift, however, added that it could publish sooner or later the “Vault Tracks” which at the time were not contained in Reputationbut did not provide other details, nor did he say when the re-registry of Taylor Swift He will see the light. It will do so “when the moment is right and if it fills you with enthusiasm. If it happens, it will not be something born from the sadness and desire for what I would have liked to have. Now it will be just a celebration ».
Before his re-registry campaign began, the Swift catalog passed by hand again. Just over a year after the acquisition of Big Machine, Braun's Ithaca Holdings sold the SWIFT catalog to Shamrock Capital in a deal that, as it is said, earned more than 300 million dollars. Before the sale, Swift revealed that he had tried to resume control of his Masters, but said that the Team of Braun, as part of the agreement, had asked her to sign “an NDA of iron” that would prevent her from speaking negatively about him. The musician also said he had taken into consideration the possibility of collaborating with Shamrock until he discovered that the terms of the agreement would lead Braun to profit from his old recordings for “a long time to come”.
Braun, for his part, then expressed a certain regret for the management of the acquisition of Big Machine and the sale of the Swift catalog. In an interview given in 2022 to the NPR podcast The Limits, he admitted that he started from “a place of arrogance”, assuming that he and Taylor Swift could resolve the situation. “My regret is to have taken for granted that everyone, once the deal have ended, would have had a conversation with me, they would have seen my intentions, my character and would have said:” Well, let's do business together “, he said. “And I made this assumption with people I didn't know.”
From Rolling Stone Us.
