Taylor Swift now owns all her masters.
After many years, Taylor Swift has been able to acquire the rights to the master recordings of her first six albums, which, up until Friday (May 30), had been the property of a company called Shamrock Capital. It had bought the rights from Ithaca Holdings, Scooter Braun’s company, which had bought them from Big Machine Music, Tay-Tay’s first album.
This ends a six-year battle for her, a fight that started in 2019. To get around the issue, she made faithful note-for-note recordings of four of those six albums and released them as “Taylor’s Versions”: Fearless (Taylor’s Version), Red (Taylor’s Version), Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), and 1989 (Taylor’s Version).
What was the sale price? Variety says a “nine-figure sum.” Given that Shamrock paid US$405 million, estimates are than the deal could be worth anywhere from US$600 million to US$1 billion.
She broke the news to her fans this way:
“All I’ve ever wanted was the opportunity to work hard enough to be able to one day purchase my music outright with no strings attached, no partnership, with full autonomy.
“I will be forever grateful to everyone at Shamrock Capital for being the first people to ever offer this to me. The way they’ve handled every interaction we’ve had has been honest, fair, and respectful.
“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. I am endlessly thankful. My first tattoo might just be a huge shamrock in the middle of my forehead.”
Master recordings are the actual final recordings of songs as they left the studio. Owning them as well as publishing on the songs means that Swift is in extremely rarefied air when it comes to the financial independence of an artist. To own everything to do with your music is exceedingly rare. This increases her net worth significantly.
