'You belong with me'

Taylor Swift purchases the rights to all her masters

Pop sensation Taylor Swift, who was locked in a feud with record executives since 2019 over ownership of her music, has bought back the rights to her entire back catalogue, she said Friday, as per AFP.

"All of the music I've ever made now belongs to me," she wrote on her website, after years of disputes over her first six albums, a number of which she rerecorded to create copies she owns herself.

"To say this is my greatest dream come true is actually being pretty reserved about it," she wrote in the letter to her devoted followers.

"To my fans, you know how important this has been to me – so much so that I meticulously re-recorded and released four of my albums, calling them 'Taylor's Version'."

Those records included the award-winning Reputation and Taylor Swift.

Swift bought back her masters from Shamrock Capital, an LA investment firm, for an undisclosed amount.

The re-recording power move came in the wake of public sparring with industry mogul Scooter Braun, her one-time manager whose company had purchased her previous label and gained a majority stake in her early work. He later sold Swift's master rights to the private equity company.

'This fight'

The situation left Swift publicly incensed: "I just feel that artists should own their work," she said in 2019.

"She's a vocal advocate for artists' rights," Ralph Jaccodine, a professor at the Berklee College of Music, told AFP previously. "She's built her own brand."

Before her public efforts to regain control of her work, Prince, George Michael, Jay-Z and Kanye West all also fought for control of their masters – one-of-a-kind source material that dictate how songs are reproduced and sold – but none had gone so far as to re-record them completely.

The queen of pop, whose recent nearly two-year-long, $2 billion Eras tour shattered records, said that she was "heartened by the conversations this saga has reignited within my industry."

Swift's lucrative tour which wrapped last year was a showbusiness sensation, and will have helped offset the costs of buying back her catalog.

The 149 shows across the world typically clocked in at more than three hours long each.

Tour tickets sold for sometimes exorbitant prices and drew in millions of fans, along with many more who didn't get in and were willing to simply sing along from the parking lot.

"Every time a new artist tells me they negotiated to own their master recordings in their record contract because of this fight, I'm reminded of how important it was for all this to happen," Swift said in her letter.

Swifties react

Fans across social media dubbed the end of the battle "Swiftie Independence Day", expressing pride and joy for their favourite artist to finally triumph in this long struggle. From quoting nostalgic lyrics to comparing Swift's new letter to the one she wrote in the beginning of the legal battle, fans on social media have been overjoyed at the news.

"As an artist, this must be the best feeling. Owning what you created and having control over it must be a great feeling. You go girl, this is marvelous," a user wrote on Instagram.

Some netizens, however, reflected on the bittersweet nature of Swift having to fight to earn what she had made. "She deserves to own the rights to her own work. It's wild that she had to become a billionaire and have a record-breaking world tour of intense, hard work across multiple time zones for hours, night after night, just to be able to buy the rights to her own work. I hate it here," a user fumed.

A 2019 tweet from Kelly Clarkson also resurfaced on X. "Just a thought, you should go in and re-record all the songs that you don't own," Clarkson wrote to Swift back then, now having the appreciation of Swifties for thinking ahead. "I'd buy all the new versions just to prove a point."

The news of Swift's purchase comes after Reputation's lead single Look What You Made Me Do featured in an episode of The Handmaid's Tale, adding fuel to Swifties' anticipation of Reputation (Taylor's Version).

Now, following this new development and reports that Reputation has returned to No 1 on US iTunes, fans feel that the moment couldn't be any more poetic. "This is Reputation (Taylor's Version)," an Instagram user emphasised. "She literally worked hard to get it all back. I love this!"

The pop-star addressed the matter of Reputation (Taylor's Version) in her letter. "Full transparency, I haven't even recorded a quarter of it," she admitted. "To be perfectly honest, it's the one album in these first six that I thought couldn't be improved upon by redoing it."

Swift promised that she will eventually release the vault tracks for the album, adding that on the other hand, she has re-recorded her debut album. "These two albums can still have their moments to re-emerge when the time is right," she said. "But if it happens, it won't be from a place of sadness and longing for what I wish I could have. It will just be a celebration now."