Taylor Swift has essentially “carried” Big Machine Records as they continue to profit off of deceiving her young, teenage self years back when they first signed her.
In our first blog, we introduced you to Taylor Swift, the fifteen year old girl with a dream who signed a record deal with Scooter Braun and Big Machine Records. However, little did young Taylor know that in this deal Scooter would take ownership of her masters while she retained the “musical composition” copyright for her songs.
What this means is that Braun owns the physical recording of the song that is put on the album and played on radio stations nationwide. Further, because she wrote the songs, Taylor owns the lyrics, the tracks, the music, and everything else but the actual recording produced by Big Machine.
Additionally, in her contract, Taylor cannot re-record her songs until after 5 years following the album’s or song’s release.
Fast forward to October 2020, Scooter Braun sold Taylor’s masters, videos, and artworks to Shamrock Holdings and created a stipulation in the deal where if the company eventually wanted to put the masters for sale, they specifically cannot sell the masters to Taylor Swift.
Obviously, Taylor Swift was livid due to her plea for years to buy her masters back from Scooter and his constant denial. Therefore, that brings us to present day: Taylor’s Version.
To get back at Scooter and reclaim her music, Swift announced she would be re-recording studio albums 1-6 starting with Fearless. Furthermore, each album and song would include the tagline (Taylor’s Version) to emphasize her ownership of the music and to distinguish it from the previous edition.
Fearless (Taylor’s Version) was released April 9th, 2021 with lead singles “Love Story” on February 11th and “Mr. Perfectly Fine” on April 7th.
In addition to re-recording old songs, Taylor has also included songs from “the vault” on the Taylor’s Versions. The vault refers to Taylor’s unreleased discography that she wrote for the album but either got cut or just didn’t end up making it on the album.
Fearless (TV) included 6 new tracks including “That’s When,” “You All Over Me,” and “Don’t You.” Additionally, Red (TV) is going to have 10 vault tracks such as “Ronan,” “Better Man,” “Nothing New,” “Babe,” and “All Too Well Ten Minute Version.”
Also, these new albums have a variety of feature artists varying from Chris Stapleton, to Ed Sheeran, to Marren Morris, and even Keith Urban.
Lastly, Taylor has so far released only one full Taylor’s Version album, Fearless. However, she has released “Wildest Dreams (Taylor’s Version) from 1989 but only because it was trending on the social media platform, TikTok, and she did not want Scooter to profit from the additional streams.
Most importantly, Red (Taylor’s Version) drops on Friday, November 12th.
Get ready for what fans are calling “sad girl fall” because after Friday,
Everything Has Changed.
