Taylor Alison Swift is an American singer-songwriter. She is known for narrative songs about her personal life, which have received widespread media coverage. At age 14, Swift became the youngest artist signed by the Sony/ATV Music publishing house and, at 15, she signed her first record deal.
Her 2006 eponymous debut album was the longest-charting album of the 2000s in the US. Its third single, "Our Song", made her the youngest person to single-handedly write and perform a number-one song on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. Swift's second album, Fearless, was released in 2008.
Buoyed by the pop crossover success of the singles "Love Story" and "You Belong with Me", it became the US' best-selling album of 2009 and was certified diamond in the US. The album won four Grammy Awards, and Swift became the youngest Album of the Year winner.
Labels are trying to stop acts from re-recording their albums like Taylor Swift
nme.comTaylor Swift, according to reports.The trend – while having been around for decades – has been brought to light recently by Taylor Swift, who has accumulated billions of streams and broke Spotify records with the updated ‘Taylor’s Version’ re-recordings of her albums.The new projects, which have seen her re-record albums such as ‘Red’, ‘Speak Now’, ‘Fearless’ and most recently ‘1989’, came after Scooter Braun bought Big Machine Records (who owned the masters to Swift’s first six albums) back in 2019 for $300million (£247.2m).When news broke of Braun gaining the rights to Swift’s masters, Swift wrote in a Tumblr post that this was “the worst-case scenario” for her, calling him out for his “incessant, manipulative bullying”, and proceeded to regain control of her master recordings by re-releasing the albums.Now, major labels such as Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group are looking to put a stop to artists following in Swift’s footsteps, and have reportedly overhauled contracts for new signees.Previously, artists were expected to wait two periods before they could re-release music – for instance, around five years after the original release date, or two years after the contract ended.
However, according to a report by Billboard, top music attorneys are saying that they have been seeing contracts that expand that timeframe up to 30 years.“The first time I saw it, I tried to get rid of it entirely,” Josh Karp, an attorney who saw the new restrictions in UMG contracts told the outlet. “I was just like, ‘What is this?
This is strange. Why would we agree to further restrictions than we’ve agreed to in the past with the same label?’”Gandhar Savur, attorney for Cigarettes After Sex and Jeff.
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