How Taylor Swift Outsmarted Her Record Label

Hey everyone, I'm Rick Beato. Back in September, my good friend Devin Stone from the channel Legal Eagle came by here and he asked me to compare Taylor Swift's re-record of the song Fearless to the original version. And I said this. Way better snare sound. It sounds fuller. This actually isn't fair because I listened to the two of them back to back and the new one is far superior. Taylor's voice sounds better, the recording's better. They did a really great version of it. And the snare drum is much better in the new one. Well, I've been thinking about making this video, but it really struck me when her new single that is called All Too Well, which is 10 minutes and 12 seconds long, came out and became the longest number one song of all time. Not the longest charting, but the actual longest in length song ever to hit number one on the Billboard Top 100. And that was a re-record from the record Red. That song was written by Taylor and Liz Rose, who's a fantastic country writer. And it's just one of Taylor's best songs. If you haven't heard it, check it out. Her lyrics on it are amazing and it's really, I think, some of her best work. And what's really cool about this is that it's an old song that's been redone. So why did she redo this record and why is she redoing her first six records? So back in 2019, I'm going to read this here, Big Machine, her label, sold to a private equity group, Ithaca Holdings, an entity owned by powerhouse music manager, Scooter Braun. Scooter manages Justin Bieber, Kanye West, I think Ariana Grande, one of the biggest managers in the music business. So he bought it for $300 million and then sold them to another company. I guess he sold them to Shamrock Holdings for $300 million in 2019. Now on a business level, it says this was a smart move because he's going to make money off Taylor's old records. Taylor was not happy about this. One of the problems with this is that if somebody owns the rights to your songs, they can control what you can and can't do with them. So what Taylor did is brilliant. So she decided that she was going to rerecord these six records. And I said, she's done Fearless and now Red. And this is what she said about this acquisition of her music. She condemned Ithaca's purchase, calling Braun an incessant manipulative bully. In a Tumblr post, Borchetta said that Swift declined an opportunity to buy the masters and challenged Swift's claims. Swift and Big Machine had a series of disputes, including alleging that Big Machine blocked her from using her older material for the American Music Awards of 2019 and documentary Miss Americana in 2020, as well as a release of Live From Clear Channel Stripped in 2008 and 2020. Swift announced that she would rerecord her first six studio albums. So Taylor, there's nothing she can do about them playing these original versions of it. But what she can do is she can use her incredible fame and her massive fan base to get her fans just to listen to the new versions. And the thing about these new versions, like with this song All Too Well, this version is way better than the original version. So she created another hit song from her previous material, and I expect that this is going to continue to happen as she rerecords these records. She's improving on them. She's a better singer. She's getting all the same players to play on them. They're playing all the same parts, but they sound better, okay? And if her fans don't listen to those original ones, what does Scooter Braun do? I mean, to me, he probably didn't think this far ahead or, you know, whoever is owning these songs now, they probably weren't thinking that Taylor Swift was going to beat them at this game, because ultimately, this is looking like it was a really bad move on their part, right? I mean, I haven't looked into how many streams the original versions of these songs have gotten, but if I'm going to listen to these songs, I'm going to listen to the new versions. They should have figured something out here, as far as I'm concerned, my own personal opinion. And Taylor now has set a precedent for this. If people are going to do this in the future, if they're going to buy the rights, I mean, this happened to the Beatles, happened to Paul McCartney, you know, losing their rights to Michael Jackson, for example, but this has happened forever. People lose their rights. They get sold to these investment groups and things like that, and they have no say. Many of the blocks that have happened on my channel are because the people, a lot of these times older artists, are not even in control of their own catalog. Some venture capital company has bought them and sold them, and then another company has bought them, and you don't even know who owns the rights, but they just put out a thing where they block everything, right? But this is a cautionary tale, I think. At first, it appeared like there's nothing Taylor could do about this. And the idea of re-recording six-year records, like who wants to go back and re-record their records? Well, I guess if you're really ticked off about this and you want to stick it to the man, right, you go and do that. Well, what she's done is she's gone in and improved on this. She's actually improving on the records. And I say, excellent. I think it's incredibly cool. And I have massive respect for Taylor for doing this. And it's a lesson to these people that want to do this in the future. Just be careful what you're doing. If somebody wants to control their catalog and is willing to pay for it, maybe let them. Thanks for watching. That's all for now. 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