Taylor Swift: The Woman Who Bought Her Own Songs Back
Taylor Swift was a teenager from Pennsylvania when she signed her first record deal in Nashville, and like most teenagers she did not own what she wrote. The master recordings of her first six albums belonged to her label, and then, through a chain of sales she famously did not approve, to people she never chose. For years the most successful songwriter of her generation could not control where her own early songs were licensed.
Her answer was one of the strangest and most effective moves in pop history: she recorded them again. The “Taylor’s Version” albums sounded almost identical, but the fans understood the point at once and moved their streams to the new copies. The originals lost their value while the owners watched.
Then came the Eras Tour. From 2023 to 2024 it crossed the world, became the first tour ever to gross more than a billion dollars, and finished above two billion, the highest-grossing concert tour of all time. Swift later said that this success and her re-recordings were exactly the leverage that made the next step possible.
On 30 May 2025 she announced that she had bought back the masters of her first six albums from Shamrock Capital, in a deal reported at around $360 million. Four months later, on 3 October, “The Life of a Showgirl” arrived and sold 4.002 million units in its first week in the United States, the biggest opening week in modern music history according to Luminate, ahead of Adele’s “25”. It was the first album she released after getting all of her old albums back.
A year on, she still sits among the most listened-to artists on the planet, with more than 100 million monthly listeners on Spotify. You can hear her catalogue on the station “Exclusively Taylor Swift” in the Exclusive section of Kalisha.
— Kalisha 🎧
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