Taylor Swift, who became a billionaire last year, reportedly paid a jaw-dropping amount to buy back her master recordings.
Sources told Billboard Friday that Shamrock Capital sold Swift’s catalog to her for around $360 million, which is relatively close to what the private equity firm paid for it in 2020.
Reps for the singer-songwriter did not immediately respond to Page Six’s request for comment.
Retired music manager Scooter Braun bought the rights to Swift’s first six albums — “Taylor Swift,” “Fearless,” “Speak Now,” “Red,” “1989” and “Reputation” — in 2019 when his company Ithica Holdings acquired her former label Big Machine Records.
The following year, he sold her masters to Shamrock.
“Scooter has stripped me of my life’s work, that I wasn’t given an opportunity to buy,” a “sad and grossed out” Swift lamented at the time, calling Braun a “bully.”
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In 2021, the Grammy winner began re-recording and re-releasing her albums as a way of reclaiming ownership over her songs.
But earlier Friday, she announced via her website that she was able to buy back all of her original music.
“I’m trying to gather my thoughts into something coherent, but right now my mind is just a slideshow,” the 35-year-old began her note, which was formatted like a handwritten letter.
“A flashback sequence of all the time I daydreamed about, wished for, and pined away for a chance to get to tell this news. All the times I was thiiiiiiiiiiis close, reaching out for it, only for it to fall through.”
Swift admitted that she “almost stopped thinking it could ever happen, after 20 years of having the carrot dangled and then yanked away. But that’s all in the past now.”
She marveled, “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.”
As for her highly anticipated “Reputation (Taylor’s Version)” album — one of the two she has yet to re-release — the pop superstar confessed to her fans that she hasn’t “even re-recorded a quarter of it.”
However, she did note that “Reputation (Taylor’s Version)” and her self-titled debut album “can still have their moment to re-emerge when the time is right.”
Shortly after Swift’s big announcement, Braun, 43, told Page Six he’s “happy for her.”
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