Taylor Swift has been the talk of the town because of her re-recording albums due to the unfortunate incident with Scooter Braun in 2020. Back then, he sold the artist’s masters to the Disney family’s investment firm, Shamrock Holdings, for $405 million. Since then, Taylor started the re-recording of her sixth first albums and already changed the game, particularly the label’s contract clauses.
Taylor Swift’s latest re-recorded album was “1989 (Taylor’s Version),” which met critical acclaim and unprecedented success. With this re-recorded album, she broke her own record for the biggest streaming day for any artist in Spotify’s history, and the album became the most-streamed album in a single day in 2023.
This historical feat has consecrated Swift’s career as one of the most popular to date because she is revisiting her original records in order to own her masters once and for all. However, she made record labels reconsider prohibiting this sort of thing from happening again with other artists.
Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group are trying to reach new contract clauses that demand artists must wait from 10 to 15 or even 30 years to re-record releases after departing their record companies. However, the attorney for Cigarettes After Sex strongly believes record companies are not going to be able to get away with making such extreme changes.
Those extreme changes are meant to prevent the concept of re-recording masters from becoming a common thing for other artists who go through similar problems with their labels. Taylor Swift’s success with her re-recorded albums is something for history books, and Major music labels are down to prevent it from happening ever again with other artists.
