Current Events > So... I wanna make sense of all this Taylor Swift stuff.

(+) Yeah! (+)

From what I understand, Taylor's first few albums and masters were owned by another company and the douche who owns the company.

Taylor wanted to do some work with her original masters and this guy, since Taylor left AFTER her contract was up, refused. He outright basically told her to fuck off and that she would never have the rights to the original masters ever again. Taylor brings up how this is literally some dude owning her work, but legally there is nothing that can happen. She signed a "bad contract" and that was that.

Douche decides to sell the rights to the masters... but not to Taylor Swift? He sells them to some other company with the legal distinction that Taylor Swift cannot be given them in any way. So instead this company now owns the masters and just let Taylor Swift re-record all her original work without the threat of legal punishment. Do I have this right?

https://youtu.be/aXzVF3XeS8M

If this is right... my god the music industry is fucking even more horrifying than I thought.

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If you want to twist your brain around song rights, I'd look to the Beatles, it's well documented how their catalog has been bandied about.

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Yes, if you own something, you can sell it to whomever you want.

Taylor Swift did not own the masters to her own songs. She made a fuckton of money anyway, but got mad when the owner sold it to someone she allegedly hates, due to past drama. The workaround was that she could re-record and then do whatever with that, so she did that. I dont know the details, as I dont follow Taylor Swift and only heard her side in an interview.

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Jeff AKA Snoopy posted...

From what I understand, Taylor's first few albums and masters were owned by another company and the douche who owns the company.

Taylor wanted to do some work with her original masters and this guy, since Taylor left AFTER her contract was up, refused. He outright basically told her to fuck off and that she would never have the rights to the original masters ever again. Taylor brings up how this is literally some dude owning her work, but legally there is nothing that can happen. She signed a "bad contract" and that was that.

Douche decides to sell the rights to the masters... but not to Taylor Swift? He sells them to some other company with the legal distinction that Taylor Swift cannot be given them in any way. So instead this company now owns the masters and just let Taylor Swift re-record all her original work without the threat of legal punishment. Do I have this right?

https://youtu.be/aXzVF3XeS8M

If this is right... my god the music industry is fucking even more horrifying than I thought.

Basically yeah. This is one of the reasons that so many artists will create their own labels or go into business with others to create labels.

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