Taylor Swift announced Friday she has bought back her first six studio albums, the masters of which were sold to celebrity manager Scooter Braun in 2019 and later to Shamrock Capital.
“I’ve been bursting into tears of joy at random intervals ever since I found out that this is really happening,” Swift wrote in a letter shared on her website. “I really get to say these words: All of the music I’ve ever made… now belongs… to me.”
After the masters were sold in 2019, Swift said she would rerecord the albums, so she would own the updated versions. She has released four: “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” and “Red (Taylor’s Version)” in 2021, and “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)” and “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” in 2023.
Fans have been anxiously awaiting the rerecording of “Reputation,” originally released in 2017, for years, but Swift said in her letter that she hasn’t even rerecorded a quarter of that album.
“The Reputation album was so specific to that time in my life and I kept hitting a stopping point when I tried to remake it,” she wrote. “To be perfectly honest, it’s the one album in those first 6 that I thought couldn’t be improved upon by redoing it.”
However, she added the unreleased vault tracks — songs she wrote at the time but were cut from the tracklist — may be released in the future. She has included songs “From the Vault” on each of her rerecorded albums.
“There will be a time (if you’re into the idea) for the unreleased Vault tracks from that album to hatch,” she wrote.
Swift teased in her 2023 Person of the Year interview with Time magazine that the “Reputation” vault tracks are “fire.”
The pop star also said she has finished rerecording her debut, self-titled album, which was originally released in 2006, and said she loves how it sounds now.
“Those 2 albums can still have their moments to re-emerge when the time is right, if that would be something you guys would be excited about,” she wrote.
Swift thanked her fans in her letter, saying the support they showed her rerecorded albums and her record-breaking Eras Tour is why she was able to buy back her music.
Swift has been an advocate for artists owning their own music and noted she is “extremely heartened by the conversations this saga as reignited” in the industry.
“Every time a new artist tells me they negotiated to own their master recordings in their record contract because of this fight, I’m reminded of how important it was for all of this to happen,” she wrote.
She also praised Shamrock Capital “for being the first people to ever offer” her the chance to buy the masters to her first six albums.
“This was a business deal to them, but I really felt like they saw it for what it was to me: My memories and my sweat and my handwriting and my decades of dreams,” she wrote.
