After years of a very public fight to reclaim her first six albums, Taylor Swift announced Friday that she was finally able to buy them back.
“All of the music I’ve ever made … now belongs … to me,” she wrote on her website. “And all my music videos. All the concert films. The album art and photography. The unreleased songs. The memories. The magic. The madness. Every single era.”
Swift’s catalog with her first record label, Big Machine Records, was sold for $300 million in 2019 to investor Scooter Braun, who was linked to longtime Swift adversaries Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, now Ye. At the time, Swift called it “my worst-case scenario.” Braun’s Ithaca Holdings later sold the masters to Shamrock Capital, a private equity firm.
“The way they’ve handled every interaction we’ve had has been honest, fair and respectful,” she wrote of Shamrock, which sold the rights back to the singer for roughly the same amount it paid, according to Billboard.
The albums at the center of the controversy were her self-titled debut, “Fearless,” “Speak Now,” “Red,” “1989” and “Reputation.” Her later albums, which include “Lover,” “folklore” and “Midnights,” were recorded with her current label, Universal Music Group.
Prior to the purchase, Swift had embarked on a rerecording project, in which she would release new versions of each “stolen” album as a means of reclaiming her work and devaluing the originals. She added a cheeky “Taylor’s Version” at the end of each of the new album titles to differentiate them from their counterparts. “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” and “Red (Taylor’s Version)” were released in 2021, followed by the updates to “Speak Now” and “1989” in 2023.
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Fans have been eagerly awaiting news about the final two rerecords since, leading to extensive speculation on TikTok, Reddit and elsewhere about potential clues the singer has left pointing to a future release date.
Interest was piqued early in 2025 when fans realized Swift filed a trademark renewal for “Reputation (Taylor’s Version)” that gave her until August of this year to use that branding or lose the trademark. Later, the singer was seen wearing a necklace with a snake, a big motif of the album, while accepting an iHeartRadio Music Award in March. Then an episode of “The Handmaid’s Tale” featured a snippet of the new version of “Look What You Made Me Do,” the lead single off “Reputation.” But much of the prognostication — including a fervor around a potential announcement at this year’s American Music Awards earlier this week — never came to pass.
In her statement Friday, Swift revealed that she hasn’t “even re-recorded a quarter of it.”
“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,” she said, promising that she would still release the album’s unreleased “vault” tracks in the future.
In 2023, Swift described the album to Time magazine as “a goth-punk moment of female rage at being gaslit by an entire social structure” and promised the unreleased tracks would be “fire.”
Meanwhile, Swift said her self-titled debut is fully rerecorded.
“Those 2 albums can still have their moments to re-emerge, when the time is right,” she wrote in Friday’s message, later adding, “But if it happens, it won’t be from a place of sadness and longing for what I wish I could have. It will just be a celebration now.”
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