The rebel of a careless man’s careful daughter has finally won. After a six-year dispute, Taylor Swift has finally retrieved her masters. The parenthetical “Taylor’s Version” now applies to her entire catalogue: all the dreams, recordings, and performances she has produced since the age of fifteen now belong to her.
In 2005, Taylor signed a recording deal with Scott Borchetta of Big Machine Records, which gave his label ownership of her masters catalogue in a deal which constituted that Taylor’s first 6 albums would be owned by the record label. By signing away thirteen years of her future, Taylor achieved extreme commercial success as her voice became inescapable from the radio and has been a signature of our generation’s childhood. Only at 28 could Taylor even dream of owning her adolescence: its highs and lows, alongside the catharsis of the moment. And yet, she was rejected, deceived, and cast aside from her life’s work.
In the Netflix documentary Miss Americana, Taylor intimately showcases her diaries: years of songwriting contained in little, coloured notebooks. It is a moment where Taylor offers a glimpse behind the persona, as we realise the exact cost of fame: in baring her soul to an audience, her joys and tribulations became commercialised pawns in a wider industry game. These very pawns immediately became significant emotional points of connection across generations.
Taylor’s music was more than just a production. It defined girlhood. Since 2004, we have seen the rise of emotional commercialisation: it is forced upon us, as the various empty diaries and journals lining the aisles of bookshops draw in the individual to reflect. Even if journaling is ignored, first-person narration focusing on personal emotion has entered the mainstream. Take Bridget Jones’s Diary, for example.
Singers now focus on their personal pain in order to speak to a wider audience, aiming to tap into the listener’s personal experience. The poetic ‘I’ is impossible to escape (Rupi Kaur, we are looking at you). Personal emotion and reflection have become a commercialised experience which could quite literally be in anyone’s hands: so, who actually owns you?
I wish I had been the first to notice this, but unfortunately, I am 181 years too late. Marx reflects on this very notion in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, through his theory of alienation. According to this theory, the product of the labourer is removed as an object of his existence into the external: “the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien” (1932, trans. Martin Milligan, p. 29). The very product of emotional catharsis becomes a part of a larger capitalist structure: components of an emotional web intended for commercialisation. Emotion becomes external from the identity which formed it, allowing it to belong to a multitude, but at an economic and personal cost. Taylor’s masters belonged to the multitude as points of connection in reflecting their own experience. More ominously, her masters also belonged to the very men who sold her work as their own. Their detachment made their sales easier as, correspondingly, Taylor was left cut off from the very works which defined her.
The victory of reclaiming her masters is bigger than Taylor: in the journey towards retrieving her masters catalogue, she has sparked an essential conversation among artists and producers in the music industry, as well as among the general population, about who owns art. A masterfully disguised contract, replicated and continually used amongst musicians, has now been placed under tense scrutiny as a result of Taylor’s re-recordings. The fandom flocked to the re-recording in support of the artist’s ownership over her work: the collective united by multiple moments of intimate connection sided with the artist who produced the works from the intimacies of her heart.
Ownership is not in the hands of industry players, driven by their own greed, but in the hands of the individual. Yes, Taylor had to repurchase them for $360 million from Shamrock Capital but the freedom and availability of this choice came from the wider understanding of the disguised contractual larceny of her work. As fans and wider audiences alike became wary of the case’s details, they stood by Taylor as they purchased the re-recordings (in their multiple editions) and their tickets to the Eras Tour –a phenomenon in and of itself as it made a groundbreaking $2 billion purely in ticket sales.
Just like the lost diaries of our childhoods in our parents’ basements, the very public performances of adolescence’s raw catharsis now rightfully belong to Taylor in the reclaiming of her masters, a prospect which is exciting to artists and their listeners alike.