A revolution is brewing in the music business as a new generation of female acts, following the example of Taylor Swift, are seizing ownership of their music rights and refusing to sign deals that cede complete control to music companies.
Swift is nearing the end of her project to re-record her first six albums – the ones originally made for Big Machine Records – as a putsch to highlight her claim that the originals had been sold out from under her: creative and commercial revenge served up album by album. Her public fight for ownership carried over to her 2018 deal with Republic Records, part of Universal Music Group (UMG), where an immovable condition was her owning her future master recordings and licensing them to the label.
It is a power-play template for younger acts who are now rising up – especially female pop stars, historically among the most exploited figures in music – alert to the fact that owning their recordings and songwriting is everything. Olivia Rodrigo made ownership of her own masters a precondition of signing with Geffen Records (also part of UMG) in 2020, citing Swift as a direct inspiration. In 2022, Zara Larsson bought back her recorded music catalogue and set up her own label, Sommer House. And in November 2023, Dua Lipa acquired her publishing from TaP Music Publishing, a division of the management company she left in early 2022.
At Glastonbury last summer, Rina Sawayama made a veiled jibe at the 1975’s Matty Healy for laughing at racist comments on a podcast and for the fact that he “owns my masters”, due to his directorship at Dirty Hit Limited (although his directorship was in fact terminated in April 2023). This claim about ownership skips over the complexities of contract law – Sawayama presumably having signed over the rights to her recordings in exchange for the label’s financial investment – but emotionally it plays to a fanbase who increasingly see “the industry” as the inherent enemy of art and creative autonomy. “The artists were creating those works, so really they should be owning them from an emotional point of view,” says Brian Message, a partner at Courtyard Management.
This recalibration of the rules of engagement between artists and labels is also a result of the democratisation of information about the byzantine world of music contract law. At the turn of the 2000s, music industry information was highly esoteric and typically confined to the pages of trade publications such as Billboard, Music Week and Music & Copyright, or the books of Donald S Passman. Today, industry issues are debated in mainstream media outlets and artists can use social media to air grievances or call out heinous deal terms. In 2021, Raye castigated her label, Polydor, for refusing to let her release a debut solo album; the label freed her from her contract and her independently released 2023 debut, My 21st Century Blues, received widespread acclaim.
Artists today are more industry-literate and aware of the pitfalls and bear traps of the past, simply because they have to be. A multitude of older acts – perhaps most notably George Michael and Prince – had to take legal action over, in their eyes, being ripped off or badly exploited, while others such as Radiohead have made ownership of their rights in renegotiations an economic and moral mission. Some acts had prescient management on their side, with Bono recounting in his Surrender memoirs in 2022 that band manager Paul McGuinness negotiated with Island Records for U2 to take a lower advance and lower royalties as “it meant that at the end of a period of time we’d get back our rights and regain ownership of our recordings”.
Prince and George Michael are bleak warnings from history, but the moves by Swift, Rodrigo and others can stand as roadmaps for the future. It also means the music industry has had to adapt away from contracts based on ownership. There are two kinds of rights at stake here: the rights to the master recordings of an artist’s work, and songwriting rights, known as publishing. One senior music publishing executive says their part of the business was ahead of the curve, explaining that publishing deals tend to work on exclusive licensing terms or retention periods. “Publishers pivoted from a rights-ownership business to the servicing of rights,” they say. Those retention periods are getting shorter, they add, down from about 25 years three decades ago to between 12 and 15 years today.
David Martin, CEO of the Featured Artists Coalition, says there is “a propensity towards owning rights” for artists, but some acts are still prepared to sign away ownership for what they think might be their only shot at the big time. “We have members who are still signing major label deals,” he says. “Some of the terms in some of those deals are terms that we’d expect artists to be thinking very carefully about.”
Message says he steers acts away from ownership-based contracts. “We have a default position that we won’t advise our artists to do life-of-copyright deals,” he says. “It’s not that we wouldn’t do them, but our strong advice would always be to come up with a licence arrangement of some description.”
This is the ideological underpinning of BMG and AWAL (Artists Without a Label), which is now under the ownership of Sony Music Entertainment. “The philosophy is flipping the relationship,” says Alistair Norbury, president of repertoire and marketing at BMG UK. “There had to be a fairer and more transparent way to work with the creative community.”
Acts on BMG’s roster – notably Kylie Minogue, Suede, Sigur Rós and Louis Tomlinson – are on licensing or assignment deals, so ownership of the recordings eventually reverts to them. “They want to be with a record label where they have creative control and ownership coming back to them at some point,” says Norbury.
AWAL sings from a similar hymn sheet. “AWAL emerged to help what we now call ‘independent artists’ to remain independent,” says Paul Hitchman, the company’s global COO. “Independent in the sense of owning their rights and retaining control over their career, but without having to compromise in terms of the expertise and support they can tap into, without having to compromise on the global reach and success that they can achieve.”
Norbury believes that, with more choices for acts, music companies have to repeatedly prove their worth and think about mutual gains rather than offering one-sided deals that are land grabs for all the rights. He says, “You want something successful in a long-term partnership rather than owning something that failed.”
In light of all this, the majors increasingly have to offer more flexible deal terms. They are also heavily investing in other artist and label services companies to gain a share of the boom in DIY and independent acts. Sony owns Awal and the Orchard. UMG has both Virgin Music Label & Artist Services and Ingrooves. Warner Music Group has Ada.
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Stormzy is perhaps the most successful alumnus of this approach, with his own Merky label going through Ada. He subsequently signed with 0207 Def Jam, part of UMG UK, in 2020, but rapped that “I own all my masters, I ain’t got masters” in his 2022 track Mel Made Me Do It.
“To stay competitive, the traditional labels have to consider some alternate structures or terms that are a little more artist-friendly,” says Erin M Jacobson, a US music lawyer. She says independent labels are typically more egalitarian than majors in terms of rights. “Some independent labels pride themselves on offering artist-friendly terms that many other companies do not,” she says.
Cliff Fluet, a partner at legal firm Lewis Silkin, is less enamoured by the romance of the indie. “Lots of indies will offer 50/50 deals – which seem terribly fair on the surface,” he says. “But 50% of what? There have been plenty of indies that have been mired in various controversies with regard to ownership, exploitation and digital royalties.” He does not name it, but the recent legal battle between Domino Records and Four Tet – in which Kieran Hebden settled a dispute over historic royalty rates with the label – is one such example.
Fluet is adamant the majors remain essential for breaking acts globally. “Everyone’s told me that the labels are finished,” he says. “That’s nonsense on wheels. I have not seen one global artist of scale do it without the involvement of a major label.”
For acts burned by prior label experiences, who have signed away ownership of their masters, the enormous success of Taylor Swift’s re-recordings suggests a workaround – but one that labels are increasingly awake to. Simply Red, Def Leppard and Squeeze have all attempted it, but with only a fraction of the success Swift has had. And Billboard reported in October 2023that the majors are inserting new clauses in contracts precluding artists from re-recording tracks for up to 30 years.
Jacobson confirms such clauses are getting longer. “Re-recordings create competition for the assets that the label owns and therefore the income that the label can collect,” she says. “They don’t want their product replaced by something else.”
Fluet warns against seeing Swift’s strategy as universal. “There’s nothing new about re-recording clauses,” he says. “I haven’t touched an agreement with a major [label] that didn’t have something that was between five and 25 years.” Having chart-topping re-recordings, he says, is “a very Taylor-specific issue. I don’t see it troubling many UK companies.”
The senior music publisher says re-records are common in synchronisation deals where acts want a bigger cut of the fee but cautions that reworked versions might prove to be pale imitations of the originals. “I’m always nervous about this special moment in which those masters were created,” they say. “It’s the imperfections [that make them]. The singer had a bit of a sore throat that night or the studio wasn’t working properly.”
The industry topography has shifted significantly in the past decade and new artists are increasingly forceful in their demands. Not every new act finds themselves in the kind of bidding war that gives them a lot of leverage in negotiations, but their secret weapon could lie in taking advantage of the partial literacy that today’s young pop fans have developed about industry issues, allowing them to better their positions by naming and shaming what they perceive as egregious moves made by music companies. The era of compliance is being razed in this intensifying battle for control.