After years of a really public struggle to reclaim her first six albums, Taylor Swift introduced Friday that she was lastly capable of purchase them again.
“All of the music I’ve ever made … now belongs … to me,” she wrote on her web site. “And all my music videos. All the concert films. The album art and photography. The unreleased songs. The memories. The magic. The madness. Every single era.”
Swift’s catalog together with her first report label, Massive Machine Information, was offered for $300 million in 2019 to investor Scooter Braun, who was linked to longtime Swift adversaries Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, now Ye. On the time, Swift referred to as it “my worst-case scenario.” Braun’s Ithaca Holdings later offered the masters to Shamrock Capital, a personal fairness agency.
“The way they’ve handled every interaction we’ve had has been honest, fair and respectful,” she wrote of Shamrock, which offered the rights again to the singer for roughly the identical quantity it paid, in line with Billboard.
The albums on the heart of the controversy had been her self-titled debut, “Fearless,” “Speak Now,” “Red,” “1989” and “Reputation.” Her later albums, which embody “Lover,” “folklore” and “Midnights,” had been recorded together with her present label, Common Music Group.
Previous to the acquisition, Swift had launched into a rerecording challenge, by which she would launch new variations of every “stolen” album as a way of reclaiming her work and devaluing the originals. She added a cheeky “Taylor’s Version” on the finish of every of the brand new album titles to distinguish them from their counterparts. “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” and “Red (Taylor’s Version)” had been launched in 2021, adopted by the updates to “Speak Now” and “1989” in 2023.
John Shearer/TAS23 by way of Getty Photos
Followers have been eagerly awaiting information in regards to the last two rerecords since, resulting in in depth hypothesis on TikTok, Reddit and elsewhere about potential clues the singer has left pointing to a future launch date.
Curiosity was piqued early in 2025 when followers realized Swift filed a trademark renewal for “Reputation (Taylor’s Version)” that gave her till August of this 12 months to make use of that branding or lose the trademark. Later, the singer was seen carrying a necklace with a snake, a giant motif of the album, whereas accepting an iHeartRadio Music Award in March. Then an episode of “The Handmaid’s Tale” featured a snippet of the brand new model of “Look What You Made Me Do,” the lead single off “Reputation.” However a lot of the prognostication — together with a fervor round a possible announcement at this 12 months’s American Music Awards earlier this week — by no means got here to cross.
In her assertion Friday, Swift revealed that she hasn’t “even re-recorded a quarter of it.”
“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,” she mentioned, promising that she would nonetheless launch the album’s unreleased “vault” tracks sooner or later.
In 2023, Swift described the album to Time journal as “a goth-punk moment of female rage at being gaslit by an entire social structure” and promised the unreleased tracks can be “fire.”
In the meantime, Swift mentioned her self-titled debut is totally rerecorded.
“Those 2 albums can still have their moments to re-emerge, when the time is right,” she wrote in Friday’s message, later including, “But if it happens, it won’t be from a place of sadness and longing for what I wish I could have. It will just be a celebration now.”
