Taylor’s Version: The Million-Dollar Plot Twist
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What did Taylor Swift announce about her music catalog?
It is one of the most dramatic and high stakes stories in the history of the entertainment business. And the money trail touches on private equity, copyright law, billion dollar tours and affects the future of music. So I'm going to unpack the background of this deal, what it means not just for Taylor Swift, but for the entire music industry, and how you can actually invest in your favorite artists because we can't forget show business is big business that we can profit from too. This saga starts back in 2019. Taylor had just wrapped up her stadium tour for Reputation, which at the time was the highest grossing North American concert tour in history and grossed over $345 million. She had already won Grammys, released six studio albums, and smashed charting and sales records. That year, she left Big Machine Records, the Nashville-based label that signed her as a teenager.
She had moved over to Universal Music Group and negotiated a deal that gave her ownership of her masters, starting with the Lover album in 2019. That was a power move and definitely the exception in the industry, not the rule. A master recording, by the way, is the original version of a song or an album, so it's the source from which all the copies are made. What makes ownership of masters so valuable is that it means you control how and when the song is used, like in commercials, movies, video games, and even live performances. If you own the masters, you also earn significantly more money when it's streamed, bought, or licensed. Most artists don't actually own their masters. The record label usually owns the masters.
Why is Taylor Swift's ownership of her masters significant?
That means labels are the ones that call the shots and are the ones that profit the most from the masters. In a perfect world, this is a fair agreement because the label incurs a lot of costs in order to represent and market their artists, so this is how they make back their money. Now, Taylor owning the Masters under her agreement with UMG was a big deal. But the Masters of her iconic first six studio albums, Taylor Swift, Fearless, Speak Now, Red, 1989, and Reputation, were all owned by her former label, Big Machine Records. And then Scooter Braun acquired Big Machine Records through his company, Ithaca Holdings. Scooter Braun is the music manager who's often credited with discovering Justin Bieber and has also represented artists like Ariana Grande, Demi Lovato, and Kanye West, someone with whom Taylor had a very public and messy history with. You know the lore. The deal gave Scooter control over Taylor's first six studio albums.
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