Taylor Swift's fans rallied around her when her music catalog was sold. Now, they get to enjoy her discography in full. (Photo Illustration: Yahoo News; photo: Dave J Hogan/Getty Images)When news broke in May that Taylor Swift bought back the rights to the master recordings of her first six albums, her close friend and producer Jack Antonoff posted of video of himself and Swift lip-syncing together to "Getaway Car" from her 2017 album Reputation - the only album she is yet to completely rerecord - writing, "rep forever guilt free listening!"One week after Swift announced the purchase, the album landed in the top five of Billboard's 200, and its Spotify streams jumped 175%. Meanwhile, streams of the original version of Speak Now, released in 2010, spiked 430%, and streams for Swift's debut self-titled album from 2006 rose 220%."It was a full boycott for a long time," Chelsea Tanagretta, a 40-year-old Swiftie from San Diego tells Yahoo of her decision not to listen to Reputation.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementSo the moment Tanagretta found out that Swift was the proud owner of her original recordings, she hit play on "Dress," her favorite song from the album. It felt like a win for both Swift and Tanagretta."It's like watching your friend achieve their ultimate goal," she recalls. "It was a very proud moment."Tanagretta is among millions of Swift fans who stopped listening to the original albums after Swift encouraged them to embrace her Taylor's Versions instead. Swift launched these rerecordings to reclaim control of her first six albums from Scooter Braun, her longtime industry rival, who gained ownership of her catalog when he acquired her former record label, Big Machine, in June 2019.
Swift, who once accused Braun of "incessant, manipulative bullying" in a widely circulated Tumblr post described losing control of her masters as her "worst-case scenario." By rerecording and releasing her music in the form of Taylor's Versions, Swift intended to reclaim ownership and diminish the financial worth of Braun's acquisition. Swifties quickly rallied behind her, turning their streaming choices into a gesture of solidarity.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementNow that Swift owns her masters outright, those same fans are confronting a new listening landscape, one that's no longer about choosing sides in a feud, but about navigating a doubled catalog, shifting habits, and what, if anything, ethical consumption means now.'Clash of the titans'Plenty of artists who preceded Swift have tried to get their fans to care about artists' rights and the issue of ownership, including Prince and Van Morrison, music journalist Alan Light tells Yahoo. The English rock band Squeeze even rerecorded their top hits for a new album called Spot the Difference in 2010, only for a majority of their fans to say they much preferred the originals, Light says. In fact, no other musician who took up the issue of artists not owning their master recordings had much success rallying their fans to support their efforts, at least not compared to Swift.
That's because Swift turned what might normally be considered a business dispute into an ethical debate, Paul Booth, a professor of media and pop culture at DePaul University, explains."She didn't explicitly say, 'Don't stream the originals,' but her messaging - especially around ownership and exploitation - created a moral framework that fans internalized," he tells Yahoo.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementLight agrees. "The fact that she played out the ownership dispute so publicly and so personally made it into this clash of the titans thing with Scooter Braun," he says.
So even though the contract Swift signed with Big Machine Records - and the offer it made for her to earn back her masters - were standard for the industry, fans saw the whole debacle as deeply unfair to Swift and gladly took up her cause. To them, it wasn't just business. It was personal - political, even."This felt like another example of corrupt and broken systems that cheat working people out of fair opportunities," Mel Cairo, a 29-year-old Swiftie who works as a consultant in New York City, tells Yahoo. "Even the most powerful woman in the world, with all the money in the world, couldn't escape it. If the system was fair, she could've bought her music back in 2019."'A cause we all had a stake in'Like Tanagretta, Cairo promptly stopped listening to the original versions of the six albums Swift did not own outright once Braun bought them - Taylor Swift, Fearless, Speak Now, Red, 1989 and Reputation - an experience she says was easy given how worthwhile and exciting Swift made the rerecordings. Each new album arrived packed with songs Swift had left off the original releases, and fans quickly embraced these so-called "vault" tracks, fueling frenzied debate over additions like the sprawling new 10-minute version of "All Too Well" from Red (Taylor's Version) - released alongside a