In June 2019, Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings acquired Big Machine Label Group—alongside the master recordings for Taylor Swift’s first six albums—for $330 million. Swift decried this as her “worst-case scenario,” since she was not given the chance to purchase her own masters, and announced plans to re-record those albums to regain control. Between 2021 and 2023, she released four “Taylor’s Version” editions (Fearless, Red, Speak Now, and 1989), undercutting the originals’ value and rallying fans behind artists’ ownership rights.
On May 30, 2025, Swift finalized a deal with Shamrock Capital— which had acquired her masters from Braun in 2020—buying back full ownership of her first six albums, as well as associated videos and artwork, for roughly $360 million. This transaction conclusively ended her six-year dispute, restored her intellectual property, and underscored a broader industry shift toward empowering artists to control their own work.
