Taylor Swift Played Her Cards Better Than We Could Have Imagined
There’s a universe in which “Taylor’s Versions” amounted to a largely abstract victory while making a mess out of Swift’s catalog. Instead, they’ve put her on track to becoming the most popular artist in the history of streaming music.
This week, Taylor Swift’s 1989 debuted at no. 1 on the Billboard 200. And it didn’t just top the chart; her album scored the biggest debut since Adele’s 25 released in 2015.
This is an odd milestone considering that Swift released 1989 in October 2014—surely you recall the album’s ubiquitous millennial pop anthems “Blank Space,” “Bad Blood,” and “Shake It Off.” But that was the old 1989. The new 1989—the album that last week outperformed the streaming figures of the original release in the same period by more than 1,300 percent—is 1989 (Taylor’s Version). This is the latest of several such rerecordings, each debuting at no. 1 and each marketed as “Taylor’s Version,” hinting at the underlying vendetta that prompted dueling versions of these albums in the first place: Scooter Braun’s purchase of Big Machine for over $300 million in a secretive deal with the record label’s founder, Scott Borchetta, that incurred the wildly productive wrath of Swift.
Swift, Borchetta, and Braun have something of a convoluted history that’s crucial to understanding this whole mess. Swift previously tried—and failed—to buy her master recordings, as Borchetta preferred to price her masters into the terms of a new recording contract with Big Machine—terms Swift rejected. Swift says she assumed Borchetta would sell her back catalog once she left Big Machine for Universal Music Group. The issue is Braun, specifically. Swift says he brought her to tears with his “incessant, manipulative bullying” on more than one occasion, citing, for instance, his involvement in her humiliating feud with Kanye West. She’s also criticized Borchetta for orchestrating the deal despite knowing her history with Braun. Swift described her earlier music as being “beholden to men who had no part in creating it.”
Over a year after the acquisition, Braun sold the master rights of Swift’s first six albums to the investment firm Shamrock Capital, but—according to Swift—Braun still continues to profit from the recordings per the terms of the sale. So, Swift, possibly inspired by a tweet from Kelly Clarkson, began to rerecord and rerelease those six albums produced under Big Machine to reclaim her back catalog and excise Braun from her musical legacy. This was at once a deeply personal feud and a broader crusade for musicians’ rights. Taylor’s Versions were a peculiar gambit, the realization of a strategy devised a couple of decades earlier by Prince in his notorious campaign against Warner Bros. in the 1990s.
Prince released 17 albums under Warner Bros., spanning 18 years, before getting into an infamous mess of “irreconcilable differences” with the record label that launched his career at age 18. It was a classic clash between artist and executive over creative control. Prince wanted to release music and play shows at his discretion, and he wanted to own the master recordings of his music. Warner Bros., of course, wanted to maintain control of his back catalog and throttle his output so that he wouldn’t effectively be competing with himself in retail.
Prince was one of the biggest stars on the planet, but he was still significantly less powerful than Warner Bros. So he spent the mid-1990s trying to get out of his record deal with the label in rather spectacular fashion. He churned out a few albums to fulfill his remaining six-album contract. He furthermore changed his stage name to the unpronounceable glyph referred to in copyright as “Love Symbol #2,” and he started performing with “SLAVE” written across his cheek, in protest of Warner. This was all quite iconic and high-minded and, in Prince’s own terms, emancipatory. Here was a rock virtuoso struggling against the crudest forces in the commercialization of his art specifically, and perhaps Black art especially, but also art in general; Prince was willing to throw his career into chaos and disorder for more than a decade to win his freedom, realize his vision, and make his point.
As righteous and legendary as Prince vs. Warner was … it didn’t really go well for Prince. He never had a clear endgame and ultimately couldn’t overcome the power of the major labels. He got away from Warner Bros. only to spend the next decade in a similarly contentious relationship with Sony (via Columbia Records) while also struggling to adapt to the musical and technological transformations of the early 21st century. Prince won ownership of his masters rather belatedly, and unexpectedly, in April 2014—just a couple of years before his untimely death—when he re-signed with Warner.
Prince was an enigmatic funk god who couldn’t have been any clearer, from the very start of his career, in expressing his disdain for the music business. He’s found an unlikely heir to his activism against the industry in Swift, who has written far more optimistically about the music business than Prince ever would have but who was similarly denied the opportunity to buy her masters.
It sounded clever enough for Swift to take a cue from Prince and rerecord each of her earlier albums when she first announced the effort. And perhaps the success of these rereleases seems self-evident in retrospect—we are, after all, talking about Taylor Swift. But initially, it also sounded very time intensive and potentially pointless, as these rerecordings would have to coexist with the original albums, which, depending on how the rerecordings turned out, may well have maintained their status as the definitive versions. You could imagine that this yearslong project might have culminated in a largely abstract victory over Braun that mostly just made a mess of Swift’s catalog while also stalling her production of new songs. This more pessimistic outlook on such a project might’ve proved true for any number of other artists—maybe even Prince. But Swift really is that influential, and she really has managed to market her versions in a way that makes these old albums feel like new releases. Swift’s obviously been a superstar for several years now, but she’s only recently become something even grander—a multigenerational phenomenon on track to becoming the most popular artist in the history of streaming music. This height of her fame is also the height of her leverage in dealing with Braun.
Swift released the first of these albums, in a massively successful debut, a couple of years before the start of her ongoing Eras Tour. But the Eras Tour was her endgame. It’s billed as a historical survey of her career (rather than a promotion of her latest album, Midnights), and that’s the ideal framing for her efforts to rerecord her old material. The Eras Tour is the second-highest-grossing concert series of all time, after Elton John’s Farewell Yellow Brick Road, and it spawned the second-highest-grossing concert documentary at the box office, after Michael Jackson’s This Is It. The Eras Tour, with its cross-generational framing, has obviously bolstered Taylor’s Versions. It’s actually bolstered her whole catalog, pre– and post–Big Machine—last week, the no. 1 song in the country was “Cruel Summer,” a 4-year-old single from Lover. But the tour has most crucially validated Taylor’s Versions, which have sapped the original recordings’ streams and credibly become the definitive releases. Billboard reports a recent push from record companies to greatly extend the eligibility for rerecordings from just a few years after the original release (as in Swift’s case) to “an unprecedented 10, 15 or even 30 years ... after departing their record companies,” in order “to prohibit this sort of thing from happening again.”
Prince saw an industry defined by so many prohibitions, an industry determined to make him a perpetual victim of the fine print. A year before his death, during the promotion of his final album, Prince hosted a rare press conference in Paisley Park. There, he once again characterized recording contracts as “slavery” and categorically cautioned artists: “Don’t sign.” Swift hasn’t been radicalized against the major labels to this extent; she seems content with her contract terms at UMG. (“Thankfully, I am now signed to a label that believes I should own anything I create,” Swift writes of her current deal with UMG.) Swift seems to have studied Prince and learned some invaluable lessons. She read the fine print, and she made it work for her. But what about the rest of the industry—the countless artists well short of $2 billion in North American ticket sales? What about the new acts reading these new contracts? What’s their endgame?