Taylor Swift debuted "four previously unreleased songs" ahead of the Friday launch of her highly anticipated, Ticketmaster-breaking stadium tour.
The "Anti-Hero" and "Lavender Haze" hit-maker dropped the quartet of singles at midnight "in celebration of the Eras Tour," which follows the October release of her critically acclaimed and record-breaking "Midnights" album. Swift announced her latest auditory offering Thursday via Instagram stories and they manifested on Spotify hours later, feeding the frenzy of which Swift album would get the full "Taylor's Version" treatment next.
The tunes are all "Taylor's Version" tracks, meaning they are rerecordings of music that got stuck in ownership limbo when her former label, Big Machine Records, was sold to Scooter Braun in 2019. Swift lost the master recordings to her first six albums but later "devised a plan to rerecord her early work as a way to devalue those masters by essentially supplanting them in the marketplace with product she owns," L.A. Times music critic Mikael Wood explained. (Braun later sold the label for a reported $300 million to the private-equity group Ithaca Holdings).
