Taylor Swift has finally reacquired the rights to her first six albums, announcing the purchase in a lengthy letter to her fans on Friday. “All of the music I’ve ever made now belongs to me,” she wrote, and and explained why she hasn’t yet dropped Reputation (Taylor’s Version).
Six years after her old label, Big Machine Label Group, sold it to Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings, Taylor Swift has finally regained control of her recorded music catalog. Swift announced the news Friday morning, May 30th, with a long note to fans on her website, as well as a handful of photos on Instagram showing her with vinyl copies of her original records. “You belong with me,” she captioned the post.
The deal covers not just the rights to her music – including unreleased songs – but her music videos, concert films, and album art and photography. Of course, there are also equally meaningful, more ephemeral aspects of the deal too: “The memories. The magic. The madness,” Swift wrote. “Every single era. My entire life’s work.”
While the news was certainly a reason to celebrate, it left fans with one major question: What about Reputation (Taylor’s Version), one of two albums left to re-record and release?
Fans have been feverishly waiting for the re-recording of the 2017 album ever since the last Taylor’s Version, 1989, in October 2023. Swift had answers. “I know, I know,” she wrote, “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 continued: “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 that I thought couldn’t be improved upon by redoing it. Not the music, or photos, or videos. So I kept putting it off.”
The update doesn’t mean that Swift won’t release the Reputation vault tracks, or her complete re-recording of her 2006 self-titled debut, which she confirmed is already finished.
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“There will be a time (if you’re into the idea) for the unreleased vault tracks from that album to hatch,” she said. “I’ve already completely re-recorded my entire debut album, and I really love how it sounds now. 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. 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.”
Swift began teasing the project of re-recording her catalogue just months after the Ithaca/Big Machine deal closed back in 2019. The logic behind the campaign was straight to-the-point: re-recording would allow her to reclaim some control over her music, while also ostensibly diluting the value of the originals.
By 2021, she officially launched the Taylor’s Version campaign, and went on to drop re-recorded versions of albums Fearless, Red, Speak Now,and 1989. Along with completely redoing the original albums, she also shared new versions of previously unreleased tunes, including a 10-minute version of her masterpiece, “All Too Well”. And devoted as ever, Swift’s fans greeted each release with characteristic enthusiasm, and all four re-recorded albums topped the Billboard 200 albums chart.
Swift’s re-recording campaign, with or without the Reputation TV and Taylor Swift TV releases, has been highly influential to the music industry, and encouraged other artists – including John Fogerty – to do the same. “Every time a new artist tells me they negotiated to own their master recordings in their record contract because of this flight,” Swift said, “I’m reminded of how important it was for all of this to happen.”
