This is why Taylor Swift wants to rerecord her old songs

Taylor Swift has plans to rerecord all her six previous albums, several US news outlets report.

In the interview with Tracy Smith on this week’s episode of CBS Sunday Morning, when Smith asks Swift whether she plans to rerecord her earlier songs to have control over the masters — which were recently bought by Swift’s nemesis Scooter Braun — Swift responds not only with an “oh yeah,” but even a “yeah, absolutely.”

But why does Taylor Swift wants to rerecord her old songs?

At the end of June, two weeks after the release of LGBTQ-Ally track (not that LGBTQ-Allytrack) You Need to Calm Down, Swift updated her Tumblr with a personal, heartfelt message: that Braun, Kanye West’s former manager, had bought the masters to all of her past work from her longtime previous label, Scott Borchetta’s Big Machine Records. In the post, she explained why she’d left last fall for Universal. According to Swift, she did not want to sign a contract with Borchetta and have to work to earn back the ownership rights to her masters track by track. And now Braun — whom Swift calls an “incessant, manipulative” bully — has total ownership over her past six albums after acquiring Big Machine.

Fans were incensed on her behalf, and supporters like Kelly Clarkson chimed in with an idea: If she didn’t want to buy the masters back from Braun, why not rerecord the tracks altogether?

@taylorswift13 just a thought, U should go in & re-record all the songs that U don’t own the masters on exactly how U did them but put brand new art & some kind of incentive so fans will no longer buy the old versions. I’d buy all of the new versions just to prove a point ?????

— Kelly Clarkson (@kellyclarkson) July 13, 2019

But whether or not Taylor Swift can rerecord her old songs to regain control of the masters would depend on the terms of her contract. For instance, as Brian Caplan, an intellectual property lawyer at the New York firm Reitler Kailas & Rosenblatt LLC tells Billboard, standard recording agreements have a re-recording restriction that prohibits an artist from re-making a song that was previously delivered to the record company (sometimes even ones that were not released during the contract’s duration) for a set period after the deal expires, a term that typically runs three to five years.

But we are not privy to Taylor Swift’s contract and one could only speculate.

Meanwhile, Taylor Swift next album, Lover, is set to drop tomorrow. This certainly seems like good publicity for the album.