I expect a lot of you to have come across Taylor Swift’s new re-recording of her 2012 album Red by now – on Spotify, YouTube, or wherever else you choose to consume your music. In fact, it’s not just Red. Taylor Swift is on a mission to re-record the first 6 of her albums. Essentially, we are in a new era of Taylor’s Version.
The question is why? Why is Taylor Swift blessing the world with re-recorded Taylor’s Versions of her albums? Well, to understand the reason, we need to understand how record deals work.
How Record Deals Work
There’s a reason that all the top hits on the Billboard charts are songs produced and distributed through record labels. Almost no independent artists manage to break into the Hot 100 and the reason is quite simple: marketing.
Musical artists sign up with a record label so they can focus on the one thing they do best. Make music. Taylor Swift is no exception. Record labels manage the production, marketing and distribution of the music that they produce. In essence, record labels can be best imagined as glorified marketing agencies.
In return for producing music for the record label, the label gives the artists royalties – a percentage of the sales of their music. The rate of royalties is decided by the label.
The thing about record labels is that they are purely corporate machines. They are businesses run by well-suited corporate executives. They put the industry in the music industry. So, of course, there are some shady commercial practices involved.
Taylor Swift and Big Machine Records
Taylor Swift was previously signed to the record label Big Machine. Her record deal with Big Machine did not allow her to own the master recordings of her own songs that she wrote and produced. For all intents and purposes, she did not own her music – her pieces of art that she created. This did change when she signed to Universal Studios in 2018, but she still doesn’t own her albums pre-2018.
However, in 2019, there was a chance for her to own her music when Ithaca Holdings, founded by Scooter Braun acquired Big Machine. But this opportunity was never extended to her by Big Machine and the ownership rights to her music were instead sold to Scooter Braun and Ithaca Holdings.
This did not sit well with Taylor and in 2019 she embarked on a mission to undermine Ithaca Holding’s acquisition of her music by re-recording the first 6 albums that she does not own – from ‘Taylor Swift’ to Reputation.
This is a revolution against the traditional, record-label-centric ways of the music industry.
A Revolution
It’s a big deal when an artist decides to rebel against giants like a record label. Of course, it’s not such a big deal when the artist is a musical juggernaut like Taylor Swift with a large following. Still, it sets a very important precedent of artists triumphing over their musical overlords, so to speak.
Of course, to help her triumph, it is upon us as consumers to choose to listen to her re-recorded Taylor’s Versions of the albums instead of the original albums. Let’s play our part and make music a more enjoyable, lucrative and fulfilling outlet for our favorite artists. I can’t imagine an artist more fit to set this new revolution in motion than Taylor Swift.
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