Taylor Swift has bought back the master recordings to her first six albums, giving her control over her entire catalogue for the first time. “I almost stopped thinking it could ever happen, after 20 years of having the carrot dangled and then yanked away,” she wrote in a letter to fans. “But that’s all in the past now. All of the music I’ve ever made … now belongs … to me.”
She originally lost the rights in 2019 when her first record label, Big Machine, sold them to music executive Scooter Braun. Swift described the sale to Braun as her “worst case scenario”, and said she had not been given the opportunity to buy her work outright, but to “earn” one album back for each new album she recorded for the label. Her subsequent albums, from 2019’s Lover onwards, were released on Republic, with Swift retaining the rights to the master recordings.
