HOW TAYLOR SWIFT is Leading the Way by Robert Baird
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PMA MAGAZINE N01
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f all the reasons that Taylor Swift deserves to be Time magazine’s first ever musician Person of the Year, none are bigger than her smashing victories over misogyny and the music business’s malign way of swindling artists and stealing valuable intellectual property. The particulars of her creative predicament are well known. Once a shy, teenaged country music artist who played banjo and sported pigtails, Swift’s first six albums (Taylor Swift, Fearless, Speak Now, Red, 1989, and Reputation), were recorded for her thenlabel, Nashville’s Big Machine Records. The master tapes to those recordings became the property of controversial artist manager Scooter Braun (Justin Bieber, Kanye West) when he bought Big Machine in 2019. Swift’s efforts to buy back her masters were unsuccessful when Braun countered that Big Machine would sell her the masters of the first six if she would agree to give them ownership of the masters of her next six albums. Crucially, Swift owned the publishing rights to all her music throughout this dispute, which gave her the right to re-record those songs any time she chose. In a move that many artists simply could not do artistic-
ally—think of Bruce Springsteen re-recording Born to Run in 1985, a decade after its original release—Swift is now systemically re-recording and re-releasing her original albums with the added suffix (Taylor’s Version). This strategy, initially dismissed by Braun as a bluff, not only means Swift owns these new masters, it also enables her to control the licensing of her songs for commercial use, making the original masters essentially worthless. It’s a gutsy and hugely impressive feat by a smart and driven woman determined to earn and re-earn her superstardom on her own terms. The most recent release of these re-recordings is 1989 (Taylor’s Version), the album that, in its original version, shot her career into the stratosphere. With a shrewd and dedicated team around her, Swift is not only the biggest music superstar on the planet but also one that concentrates on details that matter (and that accumulate $$$), like releasing 15 versions of 1989 (Taylor’s Version) on physical formats, including five coloured vinyl variants, eight CD packages, and two cassettes. Pop music that can sell oodles of $35 LPs pressed in pastel colors is not to be underestimated. According to the Billboard magazine charts, ably deciphered in The New York
