Are you ready for this Taylor Swift news?
After a years-long battle to obtain the master recordings of her first six albums—Taylor Swift, Fearless, Speak Now, Red, 1989 and Reputation—the “Shake It Off” singer made a deal with Shamrock Capital to officially own all of her music, she announced May 30.
“All of the music I’ve ever made,” the Grammy winner shared in a letter, posted to her website, “now belongs…to me.”
Taylor first addressed the battle in June 2019 after learning Scooter Braun‘s Ithaca Holdings LLC had purchased her record label Big Machine for a reported $300 million, gaining the rights to her albums. The following year, Scooter—who Taylor previously accused of bullying her—and his company sold Big Machine Label Group—and thus, Taylor’s six albums—to Shamrock.
“And all my music videos,” Taylor, now signed to Republic Records and Universal Music Group, continued her letter. “And all the concert films. The album art and photography. The unreleased songs. The memories. The magic. The madness. Every single era. My entire life’s work.”
Amid this journey, Taylor has released rerecorded albums of Fearless (Taylor’s Version), Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), Red (Taylor’s Version) and 1989 (Taylor’s Version). Plus, she dropped new albums Lover, Folklore, Evermore, Midnights and The Tortured Poets Department.
“To say this is my greatest dream come true is actually being pretty reserved about it,” Taylor added. “To my fans, you know how important this has been to me – so much so that I meticulously re-recorded and released 4 of my albums, calling them Taylor’s Version. The passionate support you showed those albums and the success story you turned The Eras Tour into is why I was able to buy back my music. I can’t thank you enough for helping to reunite me with this art that I have dedicated my life to, but have never owned until now.”
“All I’ve ever wanted was the opportunity to work hard enough to one day purchase my masters outright with no strings attached, no partnership, with full autonomy,” Taylor continued. “I will be forever grateful to everyone at Shamrock Capital for being the first people to ever offer this to me. The way they’ve handled every interaction we’ve had has been honest, fair, and respectful. This was a business deal to them, but I really felt like they saw it for what it was to me: My memories and my sweat and my handwriting and my decades of dreams. I am endlessly thankful. My first tattoo might just be a huge shamrock in the middle of my forehead.”
As for what will happen with the rerecorded version of her beloved album Reputation?
“Full transparency: I haven’t even re-recorded a quarter of it,” she explained. “The reputation album was so specific to that time in my life, and I kept hitting a stopping point when I tried to remake it. All that defiance, that longing to be understood while feeling purposely misunderstood, that desperate hope, that shame-born snark and mischief. To be perfectly honest, it’s the album in those first 6 that I thought couldn’t be improved on my redoing it. Not the music, or photos, or videos. So I kept putting it off.”
“There will be a time (if you’re into the idea) for the unreleased vault tracks from that album to hatch,” Taylor continued. “I’ve already completely re-recorded my entire debut album, and I really love how it sounds now. Those 2 albums can still have their moments to re-emerge when the time is right, if that would be something you guys would be excited about. But if it happens, it won’t be from a place of sadness and longing for what I wish I could have.”
It will only be a celebration.
“I’m extremely heartened by the conversations this saga has reignited within my industry among artists and fans,” Taylor concluded. “Every time a news artist tells me they negotiated their own master recordings in their contract because of this fight, I’m reminded of how important it was for all of this to happen. Thank you for being curious about something that used to be thought of as too industry-centric for broad discussion. You’ll never know how much it means to me that you cared. Even a single bit of it counted and ended us up here.”
“Thanks to you and your goodwill, teamwork and encouragement, the best things that have ever been mine,” she added, “finally actually are.”
Despite any bad blood over the master battle, Taylor found comfort in revisiting her early music.
“I have recently begun re-recording my older music and it has already proven to be both exciting and creatively fulfilling,” she said in a November 2022 message shared to X. “I have plenty of surprises in store. I want to thank you guys for supporting me through this ongoing saga, and I can’t wait for you to hear what I’ve been dreaming up.”
And she’s received a lot of support along the way, including priceless advice from Kelly Clarkson.
“U should go in & re-record all the songs that U don’t own the masters on exactly how U did them but put brand new art & some kind of incentive so fans will no longer buy the old versions,” the American Idol alum tweeted in July 2019. “I’d buy all of the new versions just to prove a point.”
And Taylor is eternally grateful for Kelly’s backing.
“You know what’s so funny? She just sent me flowers,” Kelly exclusively told E! News in November 2023. “She was like, ‘Every time I release something’—’cause she just did 1989. I got that really cute cardigan, too.”
“I love how kind she is,” the Kelly Clarkson Show host continued. “She’s a very smart businesswoman. So, she would have thought of that. But it just sucks when you see artists that you admire and you respect really wanting something and it’s special to them. You know if they’re going to find a loophole, you find a loophole. And she did it and literally is, like, the best-selling artist I feel like of all-time now.”
Prior to her masters announcement, Taylor was enjoying time out of the spotlight with boyfriend Travis Kelce after wrapping up her history-making Eras Tour in late 2024.
And she’s been spending the last few months processing that major milestone.
“People often say that sometimes the greatest challenges in life end up being something you’re so proud of, or end up being the most gratifying feeling in the end, if you can rise to the occasion,” the 35-year-old said in March while virtually accepting the 2025 iHeart Music Awards Tour of the Century honor. “And this tour was absolutely the most challenging thing I’ve ever done in my life.”
“And the only reason I was able to take on those challenges,” she added, “among others—the ambition of the production, the length of the show, the amount of shows, all the different countries we played in—that’s all because the fans.”
Keep reading for more enchanting facts about Taylor.
1. While Taylor Swift writes all of her own music, she specifically wrote her entire Speak Now album all by herself. No co-writers, just her. The album was released in Oct. 2010, when Taylor was just 20.
2. She grew up on a Christmas tree farm with her family in Pennsylvania. She references her time there on her holiday song of the same name.
3. She’s named after James Taylor. That’s right, from one music legend to another.
4. She’s a former Abercrombie model. Just like fellow stars Channing Tatum, Jennifer Lawrence, Emma Roberts and Ashton Kutcher, T.Swift modeled for the company in 2003.
5. She gave Eric Church her first gold record. Back in 2006, she joined Rascal Flatts on their tour after Church was fired. “Actually, she called me after I got fired. I read in the paper that we were fired. She called and said ‘I want you to know that I love what you do,'” Church previously told the Arizona Daily Star. “I joked with her, ‘This is your crowd; they’re going to love you. You’re going to owe me your first gold record.’ I was kidding, but when she got her first gold record she gave me one. It came with a note: ‘Thanks for playing too long and too loud on the Flatts tour. I sincerely appreciate it. Taylor.'”
6. She has doubled-jointed elbows. During her 2016 Vogue 73 questions video, Taylor was asked if she has any “really cool or bizarre” talents. In response, she said, “OK, I’m well aware that this is not a talent, but this is like the only thing that I can do. I have double-jointed elbows.”
7. Her drink of choice? Vodka and Diet Coke, as revealed in that same Vogue video.
8. She turned off her comments on social media to “block some of the noise.” In her essay for Elle, entitled “30 Things I Learned Before Turning 30,” Taylor explained, “social media can be great, but it can also inundate your brain with images of what you aren’t, how you’re failing, or who is in a cooler locale than you at any given moment. One thing I do to lessen this weird insecurity laser beam is to turn off comments. Yes, I keep comments off on my posts. That way, I’m showing my friends and fans updates on my life, but I’m training my brain to not need the validation of someone telling me that I look [fire emojis].”
9. She was originally going to name her seventh studio album Daylight before landing on Lover. But since the album was the follow-up to reputation, the singer thought the name Daylight would be a little too on the nose. So, when Taylor wrote the song “Lover,” she decided that would be the name of the album.
10. She’s the youngest solo artist to win Album of the Year. T.Swift was just 20 when she won the top honors in 2010 for her beloved album, Fearless.
11. Taylor made history at the 2024 Grammys, becoming the first female artist to win Album of the Year four times. (For Fearless, 1989, Folklore and Midnights.)
12. The singer’s album, Lover, sold over 1 million pure copies in the United States in its first few months alone, according to Chart Data. This was the first album to reach this milestone in 2019.
13. More historic milestones! At the 2019 American Music Awards, Taylor surpassed Michael Jackson‘s record to become the most awarded artist at the AMAs.
14. As a child, Taylor wanted to be a stockbroker, just like her dad! But she went on to find her true calling in music, later moving from Pennsylvania to Tennessee with her family to kick off her career.
15. She learned to play guitar around the age of 12 after learning a few chords from a technician who was fixing her computer. She then went on to write her first song, “Lucky You.”
16. She’s “obsessed” with Phoebe Waller-Bridge. While talking about her love for Fleabag, Taylor told Entertainment Weekly, “She makes you crack up, shocks you, and breaks your heart all in the span of a few minutes in that show.” Taylor later performed on the SNL episode which the Amazon Prime star hosted!
17. She wrote her own monologue for her appearance on Saturday Night Live in 2009, which doesn’t usually happen with celeb guests. Taylor clearly impressed the team with “Monologue Song (La La La).”
18. She’s been BFFs with Selena Gomez since their respective relationships with the Jonas Brothers. (ICYMI, SelGo even supported her best friend in Nov. 2021 when she returned to SNL to perform the 10-minute version of “All Too Well.”) Back in 2008, Taylor spent time with Joe Jonas, while Gomez dated his younger brother, Nick Jonas. The two quickly became close pals, and have remained tight to this day. Taylor even offered to be the flower girl in Gomez’s wedding to fiance Benny Blanco.
19. Remember the “redhead named Abigail” that Taylor references in “Fifteen,” her beloved song about growing up? Well, she and Taylor are still BFFs, too! Abigail Anderson is her name, and Taylor was a bridesmaid in her wedding in 2017.
20. She’s a godmother, holding that distinction for pal Jaime King‘s son Leo Thames and BFF Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds‘ daughters James, Inez and Betty.
21. Taylor has said that she may never perform her song “Soon You’ll Get Better,” which is about her mother’s cancer battle. During a Q&A session in Aug. 2019, as part of a SiriusXM Town Hall special, she shared, “It was hard to write, it’s hard to sing. It’s hard to listen to for me, but sometimes music is like that.”
22. She doesn’t have X, formerly known as Twitter, on her phone. In an interview with Billboard, Taylor explained, “Sometimes, when I open Twitter, I get so overwhelmed that I just immediately close it. I haven’t had Twitter on my phone in a while because I don’t like to have too much news. Like, I follow politics, and that’s it. But I don’t like to follow who has broken up with who, or who wore an interesting pair of shoes. There’s only so much bandwidth my brain can really have.”
23. She’s never been to therapy. “I talk to my mom a lot, because my mom is the one who’s seen everything,” Taylor told Rolling Stone in Sept. 2019. “God, it takes so long to download somebody on the last 29 years of my life, and my mom has seen it all.”
24. According to an interview, her favorite lyrics off of her Lover album are, “Ladies and gentlemen, will you please stand? / With every guitar string scar on my hand/I take this magnetic force of a man to be my lover.”
25. Taylor is a billionaire! According to an Oct. 2024 report published by Bloomberg, after breaking records in the industry for over a decade, Taylor’s Eras Tour helped her achieve billionaire status.
26. The 2019 Netflix film, Someone Great, inspired her music, “I cried watching the movie. For about a week, I start waking up from dreams that I’m living out that scenario—that that’s happening to me,” she told Elvis Duran during an interview. “I’d have these lyrics in my head based on the dynamics of these characters and I went in the studio with Jack Antonoff.” The studio session led to the creation of Taylor’s song, “Death By a Thousand Cuts.”
27. She has a special place for her most emotional songs. From “All Too Well” to “The Archer,” the superstar reserves the fifth spot on her albums for a ballad.
28. She’s over hiding from cameras: In fact, she’s proudly supported boyfriend Travis Kelce at NFL games since 2023. “When you say a relationship is public, that means I’m going to see him do what he loves, we’re showing up for each other, other people are there and we don’t care,” she told Time. “The opposite of that is you have to go to an extreme amount of effort to make sure no one knows that you’re seeing someone. And we’re just proud of each other.”
