After a hard-fought battle, Taylor Swift is finally the owner of her entire life’s work.
The pop superstar revealed Friday that she has bought back the master recordings of her first six albums.
“Hi. I’m trying to gather my thoughts into something coherent, but right now my mind is just a slideshow. A flashback sequence of all the times I daydreamed about, wishes for, and pined away for a chance to get to tell you this news,” Swift, 35, wrote in a digital note shared to her website.
“All the times I was thiiiiiiiis 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 then yanked away. But that’s all in the past now. I’ve been bursting into tears of joy at random intervals ever since I found out that this is really happening. I really get to say these words,” she continued.
“All of the music I ever made... now belongs... to me,” she said. “My entire life’s work.”
“To say this is my greatest dream come true is actually being pretty reserved about it. 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,” Swift added.
She credited fans’ “passionate support” of the albums, in addition to “the success story [they] turned” her record-breaking Eras Tour into, as the reason she was able to buy back her music.
“I can’t thank you enough for helping to reunite me with this art that I dedicated my life to, but have never owned until now. All I 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,” she said.
“I will be forever grateful to everyone at Shamrock Capital for being the first people to ever offer this to me. The way they’ve handled every interaction we’ve had has been honest, fair, and respectful. This was a business deal to them, but I really felt like they saw it for what it was to me: My memories and my sweat and my handwriting and my decades of dreams. I am endlessly thankful.”
She quipped: “My first tattoo might just be a huge shamrock in the middle of my forehead.”
Shamrock Capital, an investment fund, first acquired the masters to Swift’s six albums in 2020 from music mogul Scooter Braun in a deal believed to be more than $300 million.
It’s unknown how much Swift paid to buy back all of the masters, though The Guardian reports that previous estimates of $600 million to $1 billion are inaccurately high.
Braun initially gained ownership of her six-album catalog in 2019, when one of his companies, Ithaca Holdings LLC, purchased Big Machine Records, the label the “Cruel Summer” singer had been signed to from 2006 to 2018.
The sale caused major furor at the time as Swift claimed she had begged to buy her own work outright, but was denied the chance. In August 2019, she announced she would be working to re-record her early albums as a way to gain ownership of her music. So far, she’s released Fearless (Taylor's Version), Red (Taylor's Version), Speak Now (Taylor's Version) and 1989 (Taylor's Version).
Following the release of 1989 (Taylor’s Version) in 2023, fans have been begging her for the remake of Reputation (2017) and her debut album, Taylor Swift (2006).
While Swift hadn’t yet formally announced her plans to re-record the album, she addressed it in the letter, saying: “I know, I know. What about Rep TV? Full transparency: I haven’t even re-recorded a quarter of 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 claimed that it’s the “one album in those first six that I thought couldn’t be improved upon by redoing it.”
“So I kept putting it off. There will be a time (if you’re into the idea) for the unreleased Vault tracks from that album to hatch.”
Swift did, however, reveal that she’s “already completely re-recorded my entire debut album.”
“Those two albums can still have their moments to re-emerge when the time is right,” she teased, “if that would be something you guys would be excited about. But if it happens, it won’t be from a place of sadness and longing for what I could have. It will just be a celebration now.”
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