put the masters in the bag

taylor swift studies drives a getaway car

I was waiting for the dust to settle before opining on the news that Taylor Swift bought back her masters for a reported $360 million. But then I was like never mind. If I’m wrong I’m wrong. So this is a two post day. Apologies.

Here are some scattered thoughts but you can also treat this as an open thread to talk about the news.

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What does this mean for the Swift–Swifties relationship?

Swifties are very happy! Like… why wouldn’t they be. They like it when Taylor wins.

There is a certain brand of delulu anti-fan¹ that thinks that this moment is going to mark the point where Swifties turn on Taylor because they’ll feel like they’ve been cheated. I think it’s kind of obvious that this isn’t true? Like if you try to imagine explaining this to a friend who isn’t very tapped in they wouldn’t be like “won’t her fans be mad.” But it will not happen for two reasons.

One is that getting the original masters back was always the ideal outcome, and in the worst case scenario it would have begun happening once the albums hit a certain age. This is how Paul McCartney got the Beatles masters back, and the only reason I know that fact is because it’s widely circulated in Swiftie circles. Everybody understood this to be the end game.

The other is that the way that fandom celebrated the news was by going out and buying more Taylor.

If Swifties ever actually “turn” on Taylor it will be for reasons incomprehensible to anybody else.² Right now… they are probably just sad there’s not more albums for them to buy. (And yet the Speak Now live album—the best version of Speak Now—is right there, waiting to be shot to the top of the charts….)³

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Is there a secret encoded message here that means we’re actually getting reputation (taylor’s version)?

Apologies to Rob Sheffield, but: no.⁴

I think Taylor sometimes lies when it’s about protecting her private life—though most of the time it’s more like she strategically omits. Otherwise, though, I don’t think you will hear many (if any) direct statements from her that are just not true. They might be very carefully phrased, but they won’t be lies. If she says straight out she only had gotten through a quarter of reputation, I think she’s being truthful.

There’s also not really a reason for her to lie here. She knows the appetite for reputation is there and it would be a victory lap to release it anyway if she actually had it in the can. See above: Swifties just wanna buy stuff.

Personally, I am not surprised she didn’t find re-recording reputation very easy to do or that she wasn’t satisfied with the outcome. The story of the album was that she went through a traumatic, paranoid period in her life and came out with real love; I don’t imagine she really wants to dig back into the feelings behind either of these things, even though she clearly has lots of affection for the album.

I think we’ll get the vault tracks one way or another, and we’ll get Taylor Swift one way or another. But the actual reputation album—I really doubt it. What I’d personally love is either a live album of the reputation tour or else an EP with the Eras set, the vault tracks, and any surprise songs renditions she happens to like.

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Are the extant Taylor’s Versions destined for the bin?

My suspicion is that for newer (post-2019) fans, the definitive versions of Fearless and Speak Now are actually the Taylor’s Versions now. They probably heard those versions first, those albums benefit from her matured voice, and newer fans do not have the kind of nostalgic relationship to the original recordings that the older ones do. Whenever we do get Taylor Swift, I think the same thing is likely to happen there.

On the other hand, I expect the original 1989 to beat out its Taylor’s Version in the long run.

The one whose longterm trajectory I don’t have any kind of prediction for is Red. I think it could really go either way. Red (Taylor’s Version) was a real media event and may have replaced the album for most people.

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What does this mean in the larger context of artists’ rights, etc?

Not nothing, but—unfortunately—also probably not that much. Artists with the leverage negotiate to own their masters now from the jump, and that is attributable to Taylor. Other bands have made the move to re-record and directly cited Taylor as their inspiration.⁵ And while that’s good, labels have retaliated by making it harder to re-record music because… they don’t want this kind of thing to ever happen again.

In the end, though, there’s only one Taylor. Her ability to pull off this whole thing comes down to qualities that are specific to her, and to a decade+ of work that preceded her ever thinking she might need to draw on her fans this way.⁶ She is not the first artist to try to do this, she’s just the first to win.⁷ For something to happen that affects more artists than just Taylor, an actual organized movement has to exist.

Such things do happen: that’s why ASCAP exists. That’s why the Actor’s Guild exists.

All that said, I think the lessons for would-be steel butterflies like Taylor (or Martha Stewart or Loretta Young or…) are as follows:

• You should be as business-minded as you possibly can. Many artists are not interested in the business side of things. They farm that part of their work out to proxies. Those proxies can screw you over in ways you won’t even understand.

• Independence is costly, but worth it. Even if you can’t start your career as an independent agent—and you probably can’t—it should be your longterm goal. Every negotiation should see you gaining more autonomy.

• Never sign away rights to your work. Which is something I personally have done almost every time I write for a place that is not this Substack lol.⁸

• Nobody will like you for winning; win anyway. Self explanatory.⁹

I don’t present the above as my own approach to life by the way. But if you want to build your own little empire, I think that’s a place to start. For the rest of us, I would say the larger takeaway is that people do care about and connect to art in ways that mean they will side with artists when given clear opportunities to do so matched with clear, concrete actions. People can be persuaded to care and they can be persuaded to do things… if you give them something to do. The vaguer the ask, the less likely you’ll get support, even if people feel indignant and angry on behalf of your cause.¹⁰

Still, there is a limited degree to which any of this action can matter on a wider scale if it’s not enshrined in an institution. Them’s the breaks. If that does happen, I think you can expect Taylor to be involved, but probably not as the face of it.

1. You can find them in the comments here. You can find other varieties of haters here but they are not delulu in this specific way.

2. Or like… “Taylor Swift did sex crimes.”

3. At the end of the day, Swifties are the fandom that gave us these tweets:

4. Taylor don’t make me look stupid.

5. You should click on that because you’re never in a million years going to guess the band.

6. If Taylor hadn’t (for instance) always foregrounded her identity as an artist, that would have made this harder to do.

7. As far as I know.

8. Actually, one of the things that makes doing mostly Substack and books appealing is that you retain copyright in both cases. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

9. Also, to be blunt, people will cheerfully screw over people they like, but they aren’t going to screw over somebody they’re afraid of. Being liked isn’t worth that much.

10. One reason her showdown with Spotify ended in with her going back is because… there wasn’t a clear thing fans were supposed to do. Even if she’d wanted them to cancel on Spotify, she didn’t actually ask them to.