Whether her music is your cup of tea or not, Taylor Swift is no doubt one of the most popular and successful singer-songwriters of the last couple of decades. Among her many Grammy wins are three Album of the Year awards, for 2008’s Fearless, 2014’s 1989, and 2020’s Folklore. But Taylor’s latest album releases include re-recorded versions of her earlier projects — namely Fearless (Taylor’s Version), Red (Taylor’s Version), and Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) so far — which may seem confusing to those who don’t really know much about her.
If you have no idea what the “Taylor’s Version” re-releases are all about, here is the story of why Taylor Swift is re-recording her entire earlier discography. It goes back over a decade and involves people who were once close to her, and it also explains why she’s been fighting for young artists to have certain rights from the start. She is taking a bad experience in her life and making it public so that others know their rights, and perhaps avoid making the same mistakes she did.
What was Taylor Swift’s old label?
Back in the early 2000s, Scott Borchetta decided Taylor would be the first artist signed to his label, Big Machine Records. Nevermind that he didn’t yet have a label at the time — he had a dream, he believed in her, and she believed in him. Borchetta had just quit Universal Music and founded Big Machine a year later. When that happened, Taylor was the first artist signed. They’ve told different versions of the story over the years, sometimes saying that he spotted her at the Bluebird Café in Nashville and sometimes saying that he saw a package from her while still working at Universal, but the core of what happened remains the same.
Over the start of her career, Taylor always credited Borchetta for believing in her. He was the first person to offer a deal that allowed her to write, sing, and play instruments in her own songs, instead of writing for others or singing other people’s words. And the most unique quality he saw in her was catering to the teen audience, an unusual one in country music. Her father, Scott Swift, also invested money in the label, which works as a way to financially support her career in a concrete way while supporting other artists that were signed there in the future.
In early documentaries like the 2010 three-part miniseries Journey to Fearless, their great work relationship and the creative freedom she got from it are portrayed as key factors that help explain her success. Borchetta allowed Taylor to be herself, to be authentic, and to be creatively involved in every step of the process, which is more than any other executive could (or wanted to) offer.
Why did Taylor Swift leave Big Machine Records?
Because the partnership between the singer and the music executive had always seemed to work so well, it was shocking when Taylor announced she was leaving Big Machine in 2018, after wrapping up her latest stadium tour — in support of 2017’s reputation album. Her 13-year contract had expired, and it would not be renewed. She then signed with Republic Records, home to all her subsequent albums, and seems to have gained even more creative freedom. But before Lover came out in 2019, she released a statement that shed light on a serious situation: ownership of the master recordings of all the work she did while signed with Big Machine.
In June 2019, it was reported by several outlets that Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings had acquired Big Machine Label Group, with Borchetta remaining as President and CEO of the label and getting a spot on Ithaca’s board of directors. With that purchase, Braun also became the owner of Taylor’s entire earlier catalog. She was the one who exposed the real issue, not long after the news broke, explaining what it meant for her masters and, most importantly, stating that she was never offered the chance to purchase them at Big Machine. The masters represent the actual recordings of the songs, and the owners are the ones who retain copyrights. They are the ones who make the most money from sales and streaming, as well as the ones who allow the music to be played or not in third-party creative work.
What made the situation even worse for Taylor is the fact that, according to her, Braun had never been a friend or even nice to her. More specifically, she sees him as a bully. The businessman is close to the likes of Justin Bieber and Kanye West, neither of which likes her very much either, but fans never knew just how bad her particular experience with him was until that moment. She was scared because Braun was now the person who had control of her entire earlier work, and she was angry for not having the chance to own it herself instead.
It became clear, then, that the dispute over ownership of that material was one of the reasons behind Taylor’s move to a different label — perhaps the main reason. Over time, she provided even more context on the situation, explaining that she was offered the chance to regain her old masters if, and only if, she continued to release new albums with Big Machine: for each new album, she’d get the rights to an old one. That meant staying there for, at least, six more studio albums. So, she walked out. At Republic, on the other hand, she is the owner of her music in every way and has been from the start.
When did Taylor Swift start re-recording her old albums?
Also around the time of Lover‘s release, Taylor stated that she had the intention of re-recording her old albums, maintaining the songs as close to the original versions as possible, but making slight improvements. It is something that singer Jojo had done about a year prior after finally being released from her old label following a long and exhausting legal battle, and that other artists were inspired to do after Taylor spoke up. She is the main songwriter in almost her entire catalog, was a producer for most of it too, knows which songs were left out of the original versions, and knows which aspects of the production she was not that satisfied with, plus many other details. This was the chance to do it her way. And the old contract allowed her to do it starting in late 2020.
That is how the Taylor’s Version releases came to be. She is re-recording her older albums so she can properly own them, both publishing rights and masters, and do what she wants with her work.
From mid-2019 on, Taylor has spoken on this situation several times. She wrote how she felt on social media, discussed it in interviews, alluded to it in songs like “My Tears Ricochet” from Folklore and “it’s time to go” from Evermore, and even brought up the subject when accepting the Woman of the Decade award from Billboard. Miss Americana, the 2020 Netflix original documentary, shows just how much she was encouraged to not speak her mind on certain subjects, like politics, while she was at Big Machine.
The idea, in addition to making people aware of what is happening to her, is that young artists learn from her experience and pay close attention to the contracts they are offered. Sometimes signing a bad deal in the beginning can prevent you from having the creative freedom or recognition you deserve. And if we look closely at other moments in Taylor’s career, it seems like the issues had been there for a long time. They just weren’t as public, so we had no idea what was going on. When she was a guest on Vogue’s 73 Questions YouTube series, for example, her advice for young artists was to “get a good lawyer.”
Most critics, journalists, scholars, politicians, fellow musicians, and artists from other fields have supported Taylor and commended her for speaking up. They note that it makes a statement and sparks conversation, inspiring other artists to claim their rights. She had already proved her power for change a few years earlier when she pulled her music from streaming as a way to protest the low rates paid to artists.
The situation with her old label and its new owner never got better. Taylor was prevented from performing older songs on TV prior to the re-recordings, and her City of Lover concert was released on streaming services without any of the older tracks that were played. Meanwhile, Big Machine released a 2008 live album without her consent. In 2020, Taylor’s masters were sold to Shamrock Holdings, a part of Disney. In 2021, Ithaca was purchased by BTS’s label HYBE.
But 2021 was also the year the first re-recordings came out: Fearless (Taylor’s Version) in April and Red (Taylor’s Version) in November. In addition to those, some individual tracks from 1989 (Taylor’s Version) were released as part of movie soundtracks. Long ago, Taylor was known for rarely allowing her music to be part of movies, series, and commercials, and it turns out the only reason why she said no is the fact that she didn’t fully own those songs.
She took a break from re-releasing her refurbished past work to put out a brand new album in 2022, titled Midnights, which somehow did even better than her previous projects, and to go on what could very well become the biggest tour in U.S. history, The Eras Tour.
In July 2023, Taylor released Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), officially putting her halfway through the process of reclaiming her back catalog. Like Fearless and Red before it, the new and improved Speak Now featured a number of new songs “From The Vault,” including collaborations with Paramore’s Hayley Williams and Fall Out Boy. Out of all of her work, Speak Now not being officially hers felt the most like a kind of theft, seeing as Taylor wrote every single song on it by herself, with no co-writers, as a statement to those who doubted she was the one actually writing her music.
In a letter to fans included in the physical copies of the album Swift wrote, “When I look back on the Speak Now album, I get a lump in my throat. (…) I always looked at this album as my album, and the lump in my throat expands to a quivering voice as I say this. Thanks to you, dear reader, it finally will be. I consider this music to be, along with your faith in me, the best thing that’s ever been mine.”