Written by: Chloe Blumke
In August 2019, award winning singer and songwriter Taylor Swift announced that she is planning on re-recording her albums from her self titled, Taylor Swift, Reputation and every release in between. The singer has been making music since 2006 and has many successful albums, but there’s a reason why she’s re-recording her hits.
In 2004, Swift made a deal with the record label, Big Machine, giving them ownership of her albums.
In June 2019, however, record executive Scooter Braun bought Big Machine, along with the rights of Swift’s first six albums. These albums were all worth over $140 million in total. Braun now owns the rights to these albums and makes money from streams of those albums.
Since the sale, Swift has been fighting to take back her rightful credits to her music and she has been successful. After her sixth studio album Reputation, Swift signed with Universal Music Group, who gave her rights to her albums from now on. She now owns Lover, Folklore, and Evermore.
Swift spoke about why she is choosing to re-record in an Instagram post on June 18. “I’ve spoken a lot about why I’m remaking my first six albums, but the way I’ve chosen to do this will hopefully help illuminate where I’m coming from,” said Swift. Artists should own their own work for so many reasons, but the most screamingly obvious one is that the artist is the only one who really knows that body of work,” said Swift. Swift wanted to own the rights to all of her albums because she worked so hard on her music.
After Swift re records, she will earn money when people stream the songs, rather than Braun.
In April of this year, Swift released her first re-recording, Fearless, now titled Fearless (Taylor’s Version).
On June 18, Swift announced on her instagram page that she will be releasing her re-recording of her fourth studio album Red on November 19, but changed the date to November 12 because of Adele’s release of her album on that week. And she released her version of her hit song Wildest Dreams from her album recently, which took fans by surprise.