Taylor Swift now owns “all of the music” she has ever made. The 35-year-old has purchased the masters of her first six albums back from Shamrock Capital, which owned them after entertainment executive Scooter Braun sold them to the company.

Consider what she has achieved... something the Beatles couldn’t. In March 1963, the Beatles’ debut album Please Please Me was officially released, and the group’s manager Brian Epstein sought a publisher for the songs written by McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. It resulted in the formation of a company called Northern Songs, majority-owned by publisher Dick James with Epstein, Lennon and McCartney. The two songwriters owned 20 per cent of the business apiece. James sold the Lennon-McCartney catalogue in 1969. Things only got more complicated over the decades.

Swift, on the other hand, has won control of her work that seemed impossible even last year. She wrote in a letter to her fans: “To say this is my greatest dream come true is actually being pretty reserved about it.” She lived up to what she said three years ago at the Tribeca Film Festival: “People often greatly underestimate how much I will inconvenience myself to prove a point.”

Down with Braun

In case you haven’t been following the story in the last six years, here’s what went down. Scooter Braun, known for being the manager behind Justin Bieber, purchased Swift’s former record label, Big Machine, in 2019 for an estimated $300 million. It meant he owned the songs from her albums Taylor Swift, Fearless, Speak Now, Red, 1989 and Reputation.

Swift objected. She accused Braun of complicity in the “incessant, manipulative bullying” against her by Kanye West, one of his clients.

One has to remember that young musicians have very little say when it comes to negotiating music contracts. When Swift originally signed her deal, it did not entitle her to ownership of her recordings, just royalties from their sales. When Braun acquired Big Machine, her recordings were “in the hands of someone who tried to dismantle it”.

The next six years proved challenging, even after Braun sold the catalogue to private equity group Shamrock Capital for $360m. Instead of giving up, Swift re-recorded each album under the moniker “Taylor’s Version”. It was something musicians hadn’t thought of earlier. Back then, many thought it was a hare-brained idea, like nobody wants to admit they criticised Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival. It was a masterstroke from the daughter of a Merrill Lynch stockbroker.

What happens to Reputation?

After releasing new versions of Fearless, Speak Now, Red and 1989 albums over the past few years, Reputation is one of two albums left for her to re-record. Now, that may not happen because she owns the masters to the original albums.

“Full: transparency: I haven’t even re-recorded a quarter of it,” she said. “The Reputation album was so specific to that time in my life, and I kept hitting a stopping point when I tried to remake it. All that defiance, that longing to be understood while feeling purposely misunderstood, that desperate hope, that shame-born snarl and mischief. To be perfectly honest, it’s the one album in those first six that I thought couldn’t be improved upon by redoing it.”

Whatever Swift says has repercussions. Her criticism of Ticketmaster and pointing out fan frustration over the experience of buying tickets for her Eras Tour led to a few changes. Hopefully, her latest win will lead to something far greater for young musicians. She wrote: “Thank you for being curious about something that used to be thought of as too industry-centric for broad discussion…. You’ll never know how much it means to me that you cared. Every single bit of it counted and ended us up here.”