By Holly Baumann
Everyone is well aware of the vast presence of Pop sensation Taylor Swift. In 2006, Swift started her career with her self-titled debut country album, and since then has amassed a following of millions, and made a name for herself not just in the music industry, but in the world. She currently has over 101 million monthly listeners on Spotify alone, so it’s safe to say her music is widely known. Back in 2021, Swift re-released her 4th album, “Red”, and put the words, “Taylors Verison” in parentheses next to the title. The album had extra songs “from the vault”, that were not featured on the original album. She continued to do this with several other albums, like her sophomore album “Fearless’”, “Speak Now”, and more recently, “1989”. So the question is, why did Swift re-release the albums, and plan to do the same with more?
Back in 2019, Swift’s record label “Big Machine Records” was bought by Scooter Braun, a manager of multiple big pop stars, like Justin Beiber and Ariana Grande. As Vox.com states, “The sale gave Braun the rights to all the master recordings for Swift’s old music, meaning that anyone who wanted to license one of Swift’s old songs to play in a TV show or movie or an ad would have to ask for Braun’s permission and pay him a licensing fee.” This change caused her to switch over to Republic Records, but still, Braun owned the rights to the first 6 of her albums, the only one belonging to her being her most recent, “Lover”. After the switch, she negotiated to have ownership of the master rights (the copyright of the sound recordings) of all the music she curated from that point forward, so that way she could re-record the songs from her discography, and have full ownership of the copyrights to her songs.
When the time came around to re-record the songs, Swift went into it thinking that her fans wouldent care to listen to her version, and she didn’t mind that. When announcing the re-release of her fifth album “1989” back in August during her world tour (titled, “The Eras Tour), Swift stated, “That was something I expected to just be a me thing, a personal thing… and the way that you have embraced that, the way that you have celebrated that, you really decided that it was your fight too, and that you were 100% behind me, and that if I cared about it, you cared about it. I will never stop thanking you for that.”
Many fans of Swift are big supporters of this decision. Freshman Oona Starritt says she thinks it was a good idea on Swift’s part. “I think it’s super smart (to re-record). I don’t think this is her being money hungry, I think this is her trying to re-own something that’s really, really important to her.”
Taylor Swift is not only one of the biggest names in the industry right now, but also a hard working business woman, and is finally getting recognised as that by the media.