In early July of 2019, 10 time Grammy winning singer and songwriter, Taylor Swift, was shocked to hear that her worst-case scenario became a reality. Swift’s former record label, Big Machine, was sold to Ithaca Holdings, a company owned by Scooter Braun, in a whopping 300 million dollar deal. Swift had been signed to that label since 2006 and had recorded six of her seven award-winning albums, including Taylor Swift, Fearless, Speak Now, Red, 1989, and Reputation. As a result of this deal, Taylor Swift lost all ownership of her master, or original recordings. Swift had “made peace with the fact that eventually he would sell them. Never in [her] worst nightmares did [she] imagine the buyer would be Scooter”. Scooter Braun’s bad reputation has been developing for a while now, as the number of feuds with celebrities have been escalating in the past years. Swift felt extremely betrayed and distraught by this deal, and even tried to buy back the master recordings from Big Machine, but her contract did not allow her to.

Despite Swift’s frustration, she has recently progressed with her music career, as her recent album, Lover, became the first album personally owned and has almost hit a million sales. Additionally, Swift is now signed with a new record label, Universal Music Group, and has excitedly announced that she will be re-recording all of her albums that were sold to Scooter Braun. According to the terms of the contract, this will begin in early November of 2020. This should not be an extremely complicated matter, as Taylor Swift had composed all of her songs and is capable of easily doing so again in order to regain ownership of the songs. However, rerecording her songs could possibly devalue each song by creating a bidding war when fans choose which version of the song to buy. The question remaining is …would you buy the new version to support Swift’s ownership of her music?