Taylor Swift moves to control her songs by rerecording ‘Fearless’
Following through on a threat that rattled the music business and kick-started industrywide conversations about artistic ownership, Taylor Swift announced Feb. 11 that she would release a newly recorded version of “Fearless,” her second and most successful album, as part of a longterm plan to control her old songs outright.
“This process has been more fulfilling and emotional than I could’ve imagined and has made me ever more determined to rerecord all of my music,” said the singer, 31, in a statement on social media. She added that the rollout of her rerecordings would begin at midnight with the release of a fresh take on the song “Love Story” – now called “Love Story (Taylor’s Version)” – her first Billboard Top 10 single, just in time for Valentine’s Day.
“Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” will be released April 9 and feature 26 songs total, including hits like “You Belong With Me” and “Fifteen,” along with six unreleased tracks written when Swift was a teenager. “‘Fearless’ was an album full of magic and curiosity, the bliss and devastation of youth,” Swift wrote.
First released in 2008 by the Nashville label Big Machine, “Fearless” represented Swift’s mainstream breakthrough outside of country music and won four Grammy Awards, including album of the year, on its way to selling more than 10 million copies in the United States. Like most artists, Swift did not then control the rights to her recordings, which belonged to the label, though she held some ownership, along with her songwriting collaborators, of the separate rights for her songs’ compositions, known as publishing.
In 2019, not long after Swift signed a different contract with Universal Music Group that gave her the rights to her masters moving forward, powerful music executive Scooter Braun purchased Big Machine – and with it, the master recordings to Swift’s first six multiplatinum albums – in a $300 million deal that included an investment from private equity firm Carlyle Group.
At the time, Swift said that the deal “stripped me of my life’s work” and put her catalog “in the hands of someone who tried to dismantle it.” (Braun, who represents artists like Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande, previously worked with Kanye West, a longtime rival of Swift’s; she accused Braun of “incessant, manipulative bullying,” which he denied.) Her fans reacted with a public pressure campaign on social media.
Swift’s back catalog has since changed hands again: Braun’s company Ithaca Holdings sold the rights to Swift’s music – the albums “Taylor Swift,” “Fearless,” “Speak Now,” “Red,” “1989” and “Reputation” – to Shamrock Capital, an investment firm founded by Roy Disney, a nephew of Walt Disney, for more than $300 million. Swift said she declined an offer to partner with Shamrock, citing Braun’s continued financial involvement.
But before the second sale, Swift had already indicated that she planned to create a new set of master recordings that closely matched the ones she did not own, thus potentially devaluing the original assets.
The owner of a master recording controls its use, including selling albums or licensing songs for movies, television, advertisements or video games. While an artist may still earn royalties on those recordings, record companies have historically retained rights to masters in exchange for the financial risks they take in supporting and promoting an artist.
By creating new master recordings of her older songs, Swift, one of the most powerful celebrities in music and beyond, cannot only urge her loyal legions of fans to stream and buy the versions she owns but may also encourage brands, filmmakers and other potential corporate partners to avoid using
the originals.