Taylor Swift bought her masters for a staggering price tag (that's totally worth it)
Taylor Swift bought her masters for a staggering price tag (that's totally worth it)
After a years-long saga fighting for her music, Taylor Swift finally owns her master recordings after buying them back for a hefty price tag — but one that's surely very worth it to the pop star.
Friday, Swift announced on social media that she purchased ownership of her masters from Shamrock Capital, which previously purchased them from nemesis Scooter Braun and his Ithaca Holdings almost five years ago. And as Billboard reported, she paid a lot to regain ownership of her music: "According to sources, Shamrock sold Swift's catalog back to her for an amount relatively close to what they paid for it — which sources tell Billboard was around $360 million."
Again, clearly worth it to Swift, who has rerecorded much of her music branded as "Taylor's Version" so that she could regain some control over her work.
In a letter on her website, Swift wrote in part:
I've been bursting into tears of joy at random intervals ever since I found out that this is really happening. I really get to say these words: All of the music I've ever made... now belongs... to me.
Back in 2019, Braun's Ithaca Holdings bought Big Machine Label Group for an estimated $300 million, and the label owned the masters for Swift's first six albums, which were worth at least half that amount at the time, Billboard reported. Swift played no role when her masters were later sold to Shamrock Capital in 2020.
Swift's extremely successful Eras Tour brought in more than $2 billion in ticket sales along, which is "double the gross ticket sales of any other concert tour in history and an extraordinary new benchmark for a white-hot international concert business", according to The New York Times.
Editor's note: An earlier version of this story mistakenly noted $2 million in ticket sales. It's $2 billion and has been corrected. We regret the error.
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