Taylor Swift sent a powerhouse crew to negotiate the purchase of her master recordings: Her mom and brother.
During her Wednesday appearance on the “New Heights” podcast, Swift recalled how she reclaimed the master recordings of her first six albums from Shamrock Capitol. She explained the purchase was a long time coming, adding, “Since I was a teenager, I’ve been actively saving up money to buy my music back.”
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Throughout the 2020s, Swift re-recorded the albums she lost the rights to, and thought it was the “closest I would get to owning my music.” However, after the success of her “Eras Tour,” she and her team decided it was the perfect time to get back full ownership of her masters.
Swift said the reasons she wanted to buy back her music were deeply personal.
“For me, this is not, ‘Oh, I want to own this asset because of its returns, because of the dividends that I will receive over the years,’” Swift said. “I want it because these [are] my handwritten diary entries from my whole life. These are the songs I wrote about every phase of my life. This is my photography, my music videos, most of which I funded. My artwork, everything that I’ve ever done, is in this catalog.”
Rather than send “lawyers or management” to the negotiations, Swift sent her “mom and brother,” who’ve been her business partners throughout her career. Swift said the advantage of sending her family was that they were able to convey “all the times we’ve tried to buy [the masters], all the times it’s fallen through, all the times we had gotten plans together and figured out something we thought was gonna work and it didn’t at the last minute.”
After a couple of months of waiting, Swift’s mom delivered the good news.
“My mom calls me afterwards and she like, ‘Look, you know, they were wonderful, they heard us out, we have no idea which way they’re gonna go with this,’” Swift recalled. “And so I was like, I get it, I get it. I haven’t gotten my hopes up about this in a decade. It was a couple of months after the Super Bowl, we’re in Kansas City and I get a call from my mom, and she’s like, ‘You got your music.’”
Swift albums and associated visuals were purchased in May for an undisclosed nine-figure sum. At the time, she announced the projects would all be released.
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