TAYLOR Swift finally controls all her music after buying back her “stolen” masters from her first six albums.
The music icon, 35, has confirmed she’s bought the rights back to her music from Shamrock Holdings for a fee thought to be in the hundreds of millions.
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It means her six year long battle for Taylor to own her own work is finally over.
Earlier this month reports claimed Scooter Braun was encouraging a possible sale.
However, a source close to contract negotiations has strongly shutdown these claims.
A source close: “Contrary to a previous false report, there was no outside party who ‘encouraged’ this sale.
“All rightful credit for this opportunity should go to the partners at Shamrock Capital and Taylor’s Nashville-based management team only.
“Taylor now owns all of her music, and this moment finally happened in spite of Scooter Braun, not because of him.”
In a long letter Taylor said: “All of the music I’ve ever made now belongs to me. All of my music videos. All the concert films.
“The album art and the photography. The unreleased songs. The memories. The magic and the madness. Every single era. My entire life’s work.
“To say this is my greatest dream come true is actually being pretty reserved about it.
“All I ever wanted was the opportunity to work hard enough to be able to one day purchase my music outright with no strings attached.
“No partnership, with full autonomy. I will be forever grateful to everyone at Shamrock Capital for being the first people to ever offer this to me.”
The row kicked off in June 2019 after music manger Scooter Braun bought Big Machine Label Group – Taylor’s old record label.
The mega-bucks deal was worth $300 million.
Taylor and Scooter were already music industry enemies as Scooter was managing rapper Kanye West at the time he and his then wife Kim Kardashian repeatedly lashed out at Taylor online.
In 2020 Scooter sold the masters and all the rights to Taylor’s tracks to Shamrock.
In a post to Tumblr in June 2019, Taylor told fans bosses refused to sell her own back catalogue to her unless she agreed to be locked into a new recording contract with them.
Taylor wrote: ““For years I asked, pleaded for a chance to own my work. Instead I was given an opportunity to sign back up to Big Machine Records and ‘earn’ one album back at a time, one for every new one I turned in.
“I walked away because I knew once I signed that contract, Scott Borchetta would sell the label, thereby selling me and my future.”
Speaking in 2019, Taylor hit out at the CEO of Big Machine Records Scott Borchetta for selling her back catalogue from under her.
She told CBS: “I knew he would sell my music, I knew he would do that.
“I couldn’t believe who he sold it to. Because we’ve had endless conversations about Scooter Braun, and he has 300 million reasons to conveniently forget those conversations.”
That same year Taylor vowed to take on the system and announced she would re-record her first six albums, Taylor Swift, Fearless, Speak Now, Red, 1989 and Reputation.
Rather than simply being something for herself, the decision embolized her fans selling millions of copies around the globe.
Each “Taylor’s Version” record also included a series of never before heard vault tracks.
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