‘My greatest dream' - Taylor Swift buys back rights to old music
'My greatest dream' - Taylor Swift buys back rights to old music
Pop sensation Taylor Swift, who was locked in a feud with record executives since 2019 over ownership of her music, has bought back the rights to her entire back catalog, she said Friday. 'All of the music I've ever made ... now belongs ... to me,' she wrote on her website, after years of disputes over her first six albums, a number of which she rerecorded to create copies she owns herself.
'To say this is my greatest dream come true is actually being pretty reserved about it,' she wrote in the letter to her devoted followers. 'To my fans, you know how important this has been to me -- so much so that I meticulously re-recorded and released four of my albums, calling them Taylor's Version.' Those records included the award-winning 'Reputation' and 'Taylor Swift.'
Swift bought back her masters from Shamrock Capital, an LA investment firm, for an undisclosed amount. The re-recording power move came in the wake of public sparring with industry mogul Scooter Braun, her one-time manager whose company had purchased her previous label and gained a majority stake in her early work. He later sold Swift's master rights to the private equity company.
The situation left Swift publicly incensed: 'I just feel that artists should own their work,' she said in 2019. 'She's a vocal advocate for artists' rights,' Ralph Jaccodine, a professor at the Berklee College of Music, told AFP previously. 'She's built her own brand.' Before her public efforts to regain control of her work, Prince, George Michael, Jay-Z and Kanye West all also fought for control of their masters -- one-of-a-kind source material that dictate how songs are reproduced and sold -- but none had gone so far as to re-record them completely. The queen of pop, whose recent nearly two-year-long, $2 billion Eras tour shattered records, said that she was 'heartened by the conversations this saga has reignited within my industry.'
Swift's lucrative tour which wrapped last year was a showbusiness sensation, and will have helped offset the costs of buying back her catalog. The 149 shows across the world typically clocked in at more than three hours long each.
Tour tickets sold for sometimes exorbitant prices and drew in millions of fans, along with many more who didn't get in and were willing to simply sing along from the parking lot. '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 this to happen,' Swift said in her letter.--AFP
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Kuwait Times
a day ago
- Kuwait Times
'One in a billion': French stuntwoman putting fizz into Hollywood
When Sarah Lezito began messing around with motorbikes at 13 she never dreamed that one day she would become the stunt double of some of Hollywood's biggest stars. The French winemaker's daughter has stood in for Scarlett Johansson -- twice -- on "Avengers 2" and "Black Widow" and appeared in a dozen films including "The Batman". The 32-year-old is one of a very rare breed of motorcycle stuntwomen, with a massive social media following that helped bring her from the vineyards of France's Champagne region to Hollywood. AFP caught up with her on her own personal training track amid the otherwise tranquil vineyards near Epernay, the Champagne capital in northeast France. Barely astride her red chrome Kawasaki, she was off down the track performing stunts with disconcerting dexterity, her long brown hair trailing out of her helmet in the wind. "This is kind of my temple," she said after performing a series of gravity-defying tricks including standing with both feet on top of her 200-kilo (440-pound) machine and then flipping herself onto the handlebars. "People think I'm working, but it mostly allows me to release all the pressure," said Lezito, whose lucky charm -- a plastic beaded bracelet -- is wrapped around the throttle of her bike. Sarah Lezito, takes her motorbike Kawasaki Ninja ZX-6R out of the truck before training, on her private track near Epernay eastern France. Sarah Lezito, performs a wheelstand while standing on her motorbike. Sarah Lezito, performs a wheelstand on her motorbike. Sarah Lezito, performs a drift by touching the ground with her hand on her motorbike. Sarah Lezito, performs a wheelstand on her motorbike. Sarah Lezito, performs a stoppie on her motorbike. 'Doing wheelies in a field' The woman now popularly known as the "world stunt champion" (although there is no recognised world championship) began her acrobatics career young on the family holding near Epernay. "I fell into stunts by watching videos," she told AFP. "No one in my family was in the motor sports world. My father only had an agricultural quad, not at all made for sports, but I started trying to do wheelies with it in a field." Then she began posting her stunt videos on YouTube. But she seemed destined to follow her family into wine and viticulture until she posted a video of a medley of tricks one day in March 2013 called "One out of Billion Girls". "It was thanks to this video that they noticed me," she said. The "they" being the team from the Hollywood blockbuster "Avengers 2". A few months later, she abandoned her winemaking studies to fly to South Korea to perform Johansson's stunts in the movie. Because she "adapted quickly" to stunt work, Lezito decided to go professional, appearing in several major movies, including "Inferno", "Millennium" and "The Batman" with Zoe Kravitz. "I met all the actresses I've doubled for," she said. Sarah Lezito, performs a wheelstand on her motorbike. Sarah Lezito, performs a drift while sitting on the tank of her motorbike. Sarah Lezito, stands on her motorbike. Sarah Lezito, stands next to her motorbike. Sarah Lezito, performs a burnout on her motorbike. 30 million followers She has had her moments on some of the movies, although she insists she has never felt fear on those she does "at home" for social media. "I had to ride through flames for 'Bad Girl', a film which was never released. On paper, it was very simple, but I didn't have a helmet," she recalled. And in the summer of 2023 while filming David Fincher's "The Killer" in Paris, starring Michael Fassbender, Lezito had a severe fall. "I flew off the motorcycle, I wasn't going very fast but fast enough to land on my head and the helmet cracked." She ended up in the emergency room with a head injury. It "made her think", she told AFP, and she "decided to take a break" and put her Hollywood career on hold. Lezito now devotes herself to her social media channels, posting videos of her stunts to her more than 30 million followers -- including 9.5 million on Instagram, some two million more than MotoGP star Marc Marquez. Her garage doubles as a studio, with her YouTube trophies and gifts from her fans displayed on the walls. But it is also where she gets her hands dirty repairing her fleet of roughly 10 motorcycles. "As long as I enjoy sitting on the motorcycle, I'll keep doing this," she said. - AFP
Kuwait Times
a day ago
- Kuwait Times
Vienna calling: Strauss's 'Blue Danube' waltzes into outer space
Austrian composer Johann Strauss II's "The Blue Danube" has, for many people, been synonymous with space travel since it was used in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 sci-fi classic "2001: A Space Odyssey". But the world-famous waltz truly travelled among the stars on Saturday when the European Space Agency's antenna broadcast a live performance of it into space to celebrate the composer's 200th birthday. The Vienna Symphony Orchestra played a concert in the Austrian capital. The concert was broadcast live on the internet and also shown at a public screening in Vienna, in New York at Bryant Park, and near the antenna in Spain. "The digitized sound will be transmitted to the large 35-metre satellite dish at ESA's Cebreros ground station in Spain," Josef Aschbacher, the ESA's director general, told AFP ahead of the performance. And from there, the waltz will be "transmitted in the form of electromagnetic waves", the Austrian astronomer said. Members of the Wiener Symphoniker orchestra perform The Blue Danube Waltz written by the famous Austrian composer Johann Strauss II and conducted by Petr Popelka, during their final rehearsal, at the MAK Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria on May 31, 2025, prior to the evening's concert, that will be transmitted into deep space towards Voyager 1. -- AFP photos 'Typical of space' "The Blue Danube" evokes the elegance of 19th-century Vienna, which lives on in the city's roaring ball season. For Norbert Kettner, director of the Vienna tourist board, the Danube waltz is a "true unofficial space anthem" because of Kubrick. The timeless waltz is the "typical sound of space", Kettner said, with the tunes being played "during various docking manoeuvres of the International Space Station (ISS)". When the waltz was performed on Saturday, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra noted the waltz's airiness as if it were floating through space, its director Jan Nast said. Nast, who put together the program for Saturday's hour-long "interstellar concert", said music is a language "which touches many people" and has "the universal power to convey hope and joy". Filling a gap Once transmitted via Spain's satellite dish, the signal will travel at the speed of light to eventually reach NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft -- the most distant man-made object in the universe -- in approximately 23 hours and 3 minutes. After surpassing Voyager 1, it will continue its interstellar journey. By catching up with the spacecraft and its twin, Voyager 2, Austria also seeks to right a perceived wrong. Both Voyagers carry "Golden Records" -- 12-inch, gold-plated copper disks intended to convey the story of our world to extraterrestrials. The record holds 115 images of life on Earth, recorded in analogue form, and a variety of sounds and snatches of music. While "The Magic Flute" by Austria's composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was included among the selection of 27 music pieces, Strauss's famous waltz was not. - AFP
Kuwait Times
a day ago
- Kuwait Times
‘M*A*S*H' actress Loretta Swit dies: Publicist
Actress Loretta Swit attends the 2018 Farm Sanctuary on the Hudson Gala at Pier 60 ) on October 4, 2018 in New York City. - AFP Loretta Swit, the US actress who brought Major Margaret 'Hot Lips' Houlihan to life in the seminal Korean War comedy series 'M*A*S*H' has died. She was 87. Swit who played the high-strung but flirty Houlihan for the entire TV run of the smash series, was nominated for 10 Emmy awards for her work, winning two of them. Her death, at her home in Manhattan, was announced by her publicist, who said she was believed to have died of natural causes. 'M*A*S*H,' which sprang from an Oscar-winning 1970 film, aired initially in 1972 and was a hit until it finished in 1983. The comedy was set in a field hospital for the US Army during the Korean War, and starred Alan Alda as Benjamin 'Hawkeye' Pierce. The series tackled a range of issues from the tragic to the light-hearted, and was sometimes seen as a satire on US involvement in Vietnam -- a war that was still happening when it first began airing. 'Few actresses captured the imagination of generations of television viewers with the certainty and charm of Loretta Swit,' a statement from publicist Harlan Boll said. 'As the quick-witted, impassioned Major Margaret Houlihan... Ms. Swit became an American icon.' Alongside an extensive stage repertoire, Swit appeared in over 25 movies, including playing Christine Cagney in the TV movie that became the long-running cop show 'Cagney and Lacey.' Obligations to the makers of 'M*A*S*H' meant she could not continue into the TV series' lengthy run, and the role was ultimately filled instead by Sharon Gless. Other movies during Swit's career included 'Race With the Devil,' a 1975 horror starring Peter Fonda, and 1972's 'Stand Up and Be Counted' with Jacqueline Bisset. - AFP
