Taylor Swift finally owns it all: Every album, every song, every era

Swifties have plenty to celebrate on Friday as Taylor Swift announced that she now owns the master recordings of her first six albums after years of trying and failing to buy them.

Swift posted the news to her website, explaining that she was able to purchase the original versions of the albums from Shamrock Capital, the private equity firm that bought the recordings from music manager Scooter Braun in 2020 for at least $300 million. 

In an emotional letter, Swift called securing her masters a dream come true. Swift described herself as “endlessly thankful” to Shamrock Capital for handling the deal fairly and offering her the first chance she’s ever been given to buy her own music back. “This was a business deal to them, but I really felt like they saw it for what it was to me: My memories and my sweat and my handwriting and my decades of dreams,” Swift wrote.

An uphill battle, even for a billionaire titan of the music industry

After two decades “of having the carrot dangled and then yanked away,” Swift admitted that she almost stopped believing that she would ever own the original recordings.

“But that’s all in the past now,” Swift wrote. “I’ve been bursting into tears of joy at random intervals ever since I found out that this is really happening. I really get to say these words: All of the music I’ve ever made… now belongs… to me.”

In 2019, Braun acquired Nashville indie record label Big Machine, along with the rights to the albums Swift had recorded there. After Braun’s purchase, Swift stated that she was in no way consulted on the deal and had suffered from “incessant, manipulative bullying” by the industry executive. 

“It’s a shame to know that I will now be unable to help grow the future of these past works and it pains me very deeply to be separated from the music I spent over a decade creating,” Swift said after the deal went public.

An update on the status of Reputation

In light of her struggle to regain control of her own music, Swift set out to re-record all of the albums she didn’t own. Swift began issuing “Taylor’s Version” updates to her missing catalogue albums in 2021, putting out re-recordings of Fearless, Red, Speak Now and 1989 accompanied by previously unreleased songs.

Fans eager for news that Swift had finished re-recording her sixth studio album, Reputation, have plenty to be happy for but are still in for a wait. In her announcement, Swift divulged that, “full transparency,” she’s less than a quarter of the way done with the process.

“To be perfectly honest, it’s the one album in the first 6 that I thought couldn’t be improved upon by redoing it. Not the music, or photos, or videos. So I kept putting it off,” Swift wrote, adding that she’s happy with a now-finished re-recording of her self-titled debut album. 

“Those 2 albums can still have their moments to re-emerge when the time is right… But if it happens, it won’t be from a place of sadness and longing for what I wish I could have,” Swift wrote. “It will just be a celebration now.”