Taylor Swift has now left Reputation TV’s future up to the fans!
Pop superstar Taylor Swift has finally reclaimed her years-old contribution to the music industry, which she made during her formative years as a musician. While the American songbird, who became a billionaire last year, can now call her first six albums her own, it reportedly came at a hefty price. Despite the whopping price she is believed to have emptied from her pockets, the final conclusion still somehow pulled a better deal than once imagined.
With reins of her first six albums’ rights in her hands, Taylor Swift shared the delightful news via an Instagram post and a heartfelt letter on her website. “You belong with me,” she captioned her post with six different coloured heart emojis. Posing with physical record copies of “Taylor Swift,” “Fearless,” “Speak Now,” “Red,” “1989,” and “Reputation,” she plugged the letter link in her bio.
Taylor Swift finally owns the rights to her first 6 albums!
“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 time I daydreamed about, wished for, and pined away for a chance to get to tell you this news. All the time I was thiiiiiiiiiiiis 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: All of the music I’ve ever made… now belongs… to me,” she began her letter.
The “Love Story” hit-maker’s sweeping victory in a six-years-worth-of cruel music war to regain control over her original album masters comes over a week after Page Six reported that investment firm Shamrock Capital was ready to strike a deal with the Grammy winner and re-sell her recordings back to her. Sources shockingly spilled at the time that Swift’s industry foe Scooter Braun was on board for the resolution to come through despite his initial intervention in 2019.
To recapitulate what went down six years ago: Taylor Swift lost the rights to her albums “Taylor Swift,” “Fearless,” “Speak Now,” “Red,” “1989,” and “Reputation” after her original record label, Big Machine, sold them off to the controversial record executive, who has, at some point or the other, managed Justin Bieber and Swift’s other nightmare, Kanye West.
As a result, the “Anti-Hero” songstress accused Scooter of being a “bully” and “the definition of toxic male privilege in our industry.” The 35-year-old singer was dealt with the unexpected reversal of fate when the retired music manager’s company Ithica Holdings acquired her then-label.
How much did Taylor Swift pay to buy back her album masters?
Initially distant murmurs suggested that Braun was, for some reason, gunning for a deal that would result in Taylor’s original albums finally becoming her own. However, the same report also insisted that the brewing contract to pull off this best-case scenario for the billionaire pop queen would cost her double the price Shamrock paid to buy the rights off Scooter. Music consulting firm CAD Management’s founder Clayton Durant told the outlet that re-owning these album masters could require Swift to cough up something from $600 million to $1 billion.
On the contrary, sources have since revealed to Billboard that Shamrock Capital sealed the final deal for around $360 million instead, which is significantly close to the firm paying $300 million for them in 2020.
In a subsequent move, responding to Scooter Braun “stripping” her of her life’s work, the Grammy winner eventually resorted to re-recording her old albums and re-releasing them as “Taylor’s Versions” in 2021. As of now, Swift has put out four out of the six original albums with refurbished packaging: “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version),” “Red (Taylor’s Version),” and “1989 (Taylor’s Version).”
With Taylor finally reclaiming the originally released albums, Swifties, who had desperately been counting down the days to an unspecified schedule of her highly anticipated re-release of the album “Reputation,” were pushed into a territory rife with uncertainty. While marveling at how she had finally worked hard enough to be able to purchase her “music outright with no strings attached, no partnership, with full autonomy,” the pop star also laid out what the future held for the remaining two Taylor’s Version records in her letter.
Expressing her wholehearted gratitude to the equity firm that made it all possible, she said, “I will 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. My first tattoo might just be a huge shamrock in the middle of my forehead.”
What’s next for Reputation TV and Taylor Swift’s debut album re-releases?
As for the Reputation Taylor’s Version aka Reputation TV’s status, she admitted to not even having scratched a quarter of the re-recordings. As this particular album saw Taylor shedding her previous musical identity as “America’s sweetheart,” she confessed, “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. 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 6 I thought could’ve be improved upon by redoing it.”
Coming clean about her reasons for continuously putting it off, she left it up to the fans, adding, “There will be a time (if you’re into the idea) for the unreleased Vault tracks from that album to hatch.” Despite Taylor Swift’s genuine confession about why she steered clear off this particular record, the “Taylor’s Version” of “Look What You Made Me Do” had already, in a way, been released through its feature in The Handmaid’s Tale penultimate episode on Hulu on May 20.
In addition to spilling the truth about “Rep TV,” the pop queen said that she’s fully re-recorded her self-titled debut album “Taylor Swift.” As for when it and Reputation Taylor’s Version could be released in the future she said, “Those 2 albums can still have their moments to re-emerge when the time is right, if that would be something you guys would be excited about.” Contrary to the four albums she’s already re-released, she emphasised that these two records seeing the light of the day would come from an entirely different place. “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.”