This week, Taylor Swift became a billionaire at the age of 33. Not, unusually, via the means of the side-hustle, but mostly through her music alone. One thing that has bolstered this vast wealth is the systematic re-recording of her first six albums in lucrative protest at the ownership, since 2019, of her masters by the entrepreneur Scooter Braun (as part of his purchase of Big Machine. He doesn’t actually directly own them anymore, having sold the rights on, but still benefits from them).
In the same week, reports are surfacing of labels scrambling to limit the likelihood of this happening again. It’s normal for an artist to be restricted from re-recording their own music for five to seven years after release, or two years after the expiration of their contract (or their release from it, which in practice doesn’t happen very much) but a number of US music attorneys told Billboard that they had started suddenly to see clauses in new contracts extending this period to 10 or 15 years.
