To get her music back, first Taylor Swift had to re-record it. After a consortium led by Scooter Braun bought the rights to the masters for her first six albums in 2019, much to Swift’s displeasure, she hatched a simple, if wildly labor-intensive plan: Make new Taylor’s Versions of her catalog available, and then ask her massive fanbase to stream them instead of the originals.
No one had ever tried anything like it before, but fans complied by the millions. The strategy worked exactly as intended, devaluing the masters in the hands of anyone but Taylor Swift, even as the excitement around Taylor’s Versions helped expand her already giant fanbase. The success of the Eras Tour, in turn, generated enough cash to make a $360 million purchase feasible.
Last week, Swift announced that she got her masters back — and along the way, revealed that the re-record of Reputation would likely never come out, and that she had already finished the Taylor’s Version of her debut. In the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, we discuss her revelations and look back on the Taylor’s Versions era, with Brittany Spanos and Rob Sheffield joining host Brian Hiatt for the discussion. To hear the whole episode, go here for the podcast provider of your choice, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play above.
Elsewhere in the episode, Sheffield proposes that Swift consider a countrified and/or solo acoustic re-record of Reputation, while Spanos predicts that the new version of the debut will drop for its 20th anniversary next year. The pair also suggest that Swift’s follow-up to The Tortured Poets Department will be out before the end of the year. There’s also a discussion of the best vault tracks, from “Mr. Perfectly Fine” to “When Emma Falls in Love.” Sheffield suggests that the 1989 bonus tracks are a “great album in themselves.” The panel also splits on the issue of whether all the vault tracks truly date back to the albums in question, or if some might be later creations.
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