Here’s Why Taylor Swift Is Re-Releasing Her Old Albums

If you pay close attention, you can hear it: there’s a new lushness in the opening banjo twangs, and an extra beat when she sings the lyric “Just say yes.” But the difference between the 2008 version of Taylor Swift’s “Love Story,” which helped propel Swift to pop stardom, and the 2021 rerelease of that same song is pretty subtle. Called “Taylor’s Version” on streaming platforms, the new mix was a part of Fearless (Taylor’s Version), which arrived in April 2021 as the first of the artist’s rerecordings of her back catalog. Next came Red (Taylor’s Version) in November of that year, and on July 7, 2023, her third and the halfway point in the project, Speak Now (Taylor’s Version). On Oct. 27, 2023, Swift released her version of 2014’s 1989.

Shortly after, she released a new double album, The Tortured Poets Department. Swift announced that she had a new album on the way at the 2024 Grammy Awards after she accepted the award for Best Pop Vocal Album for Midnights, surprising fans, who expected her to reveal that a rerecording of Reputation would be her next big project. Swift had dropped several hints that Reputation (Taylor's Version) was coming soon. She alluded to it in her interview for TIME’s Person of the Year in 2023, saying the vault tracks in the re-release would be “fire." Her tweet promoting the cover seemed to offer more hints: she wrote that she has “tRuSt iSSueS,” purposefully capitalizing the R for Reputation and the Ss for hissing, because the album’s symbol is a snake.

While Swift has held off on putting out the new re-record as she continues the Eras Tour, fans are theorizing that Reputation (Taylor's Version) could arrive in August.

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In these rerecordings, the lyrics and production haven’t changed that much: it’s Swift’s business that’s shifted. Now 34, Swift has gone through a full indie-pop era—as shown by her Grammy-winning turn on Folklore and her subsequent album, Evermore—and returned to first-person storytelling with 2022's Midnights. Her recent double album, The Tortured Poets Department, delves even more into her experiences with heartbreak. And her Eras Tour, which began in the spring of 2023 and will continue well into 2024, and has crashed Ticketmaster and dominated last summer’s cultural conversation.

But behind it all is an artist who’s been fighting for years now to manage the means, method of production, and distribution of her work. Art makes us feel things, a craft at which Swift is a master. Art also makes money, and Swift is equally adept at that. Her goal now: make sure it stays within her control. It’s a pipe dream for artists of any kind. But Swift has power that most don’t, and her very personal fight to reshape the way wealth is distributed from creative work is a potential model for wrestling compensation back from industry forces.

Swift signed to Big Machine Records in 2005, a fresh-faced Nashville singer with a guitar and long blond hair. The contract expired in 2018 but not before she rocketed to radio-play heights with hits like “I Knew You Were Trouble” and crossed into the pop stratosphere with sold-out stadium tours over the course of six albums. When her deal was up, she switched labels to Universal’s Republic Records. Big Machine owns the masters, or original recordings, of her first six albums, as is typical with many recording deals. In her new contract, Swift made sure to secure ownership of her future masters. Changing labels, carving out more agency, updating contract terms—these steps are par for the course for a successful artist. People change, and so do the contracts that govern them.

What is Taylor Swift’s dispute with her old label?

But Swift’s behind-the-scenes moves became front-page news when Big Machine sold to private-equity group Ithaca Holdings, an entity owned by powerhouse music manager Scooter Braun. He then sold her masters to another company, Shamrock Holdings, for a reported $300 million in 2019. On a business level, Braun’s move was smart: Swift’s master recordings reap profits whenever the songs are streamed or bought. On the personal front, it was contentious: Swift claims Braun, who manages stars like Kanye West and Justin Bieber, has repeatedly bullied her, and so she slammed the sale publicly and promised to rerecord those original six albums, this time with the masters under her own control. Anyone who hits play on an old version of Swift’s early songs right now will still pay into the bank of Braun.

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Why is Taylor Swift re-recording her albums?

Her hope, it seems, is to override those archival works with these new versions. “Artists should own their own work for so many reasons,” she wrote in a March 2021 Instagram post. “But the most screamingly obvious one is that the artist is the only one who really knows that body of work.” Her choice stirred up responses across the music world, and forced the public to take a long look at the music industry’s quiet corporate machinations.

Artists regularly chafe against their record label contracts; see Kanye West, who very publicly vented against his own contractual obligations in 2020 (before a series of escalating controversies moved the conversation further and further from his music). But rarely do they go through the hassle of re-recording and re-releasing old work. Swift, though, is not the usual artist. She had time—a whole year of it, while the pandemic put her touring schedule on pause. And she is meticulous about how her work is consumed and perceived, from the aesthetics of her album covers to the comments she makes on Tumblr fan blogs. Given her unique position, platforms like Spotify have everything to gain by supporting her new versions. Meanwhile, the fans who are the most active streamers of her old music have become well aware of her intentions—and will abide by her wishes. Swift is in the rare position to want to upend the system and actually have the power to do so.

What’s different about Taylor Swift’s new work?

Not much; her re-recordings are, so far, faithful to their original versions—with some subtle production updates, and the newfound maturity in her voice that an extra decade has provided. Swift is also sharing a number of new tracks from what she calls her “vault,” beginning with “You All Over Me” with Maren Morris. Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) includes six songs from the vault, featuring Paramore’s Hayley Williams and Fall Out Boy’s Patrick Stump. The new release also includes a changed lyric following years of complaints that a line from “Better Than Revenge” could be read as slut-shaming.

What’s truly different about Swift’s “new” work is the intention behind it, and developments that have brought her to the place to own it. Every musician is a business, a startup with limited equity to portion out to labels, publishers and other stakeholders. As the business grows, the musician is left with a smaller and smaller piece of that pie. Greater equity was the central consideration of Swift’s label change—along with greater certainty that all who contributed to making the art itself would benefit from their work. “There was one condition that meant more to me than any other deal point,” she wrote at the time: ensuring that profits from the future sale of Spotify shares would be returned to artists. That this financial nitty-gritty is what excited Swift most might seem at odds with her image as a singer-songwriter who performs on sets that look like a cottage in a fairy-tale forest. But that persona hides Swift’s savvy: she’s long understood that artists, even those with brands as powerful as hers, are vulnerable to exploitation. After building an empire writing deeply personal songs, should selling her story really come so cheap?

—With reporting by Moises Mendez II