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s Taylor Swift sang on the 10th track of her 2010 album Speak Now: “I do nothing better than revenge.”
The track – which is the first step in Swift’s master plan to re-release all six albums she released with the Big Machine label – was dropped on Friday, February 12, and racked up an impressive 10,000 downloads in 24 hours. By comparison, the original Love Story recording only shifted 200 digital copies.
That said, Swift still has a ways to go to surpass the historic initial registration numbers, which currently stand at around 6.13 million downloads in the past 12 years. But other early signs are promising – at the time of writing, the new version had over 11.5 million Spotify streams, with an additional 10 million views on YouTube.
These early successes will be seen by many as a rationale for Swift’s decision to regain control of its controversial rear catalog. In 2019, Scooter Braun bought Big Machine and with it much of the Masters of Swift – in other words, he owned the actual music recordings released by Swift when he was signed to the label. This went against the wishes of Swift, who had been trying to buy her masters for a few years.
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Then, in October 2020, Braun sold the masters to private equity firm Shamrock Holdings in a deal valued at around $ 300 million. But most importantly, just about a month after that, a clause expired in Swift’s original Big Machine contract, which meant that she was now allowed to re-record and re-release all of her music, creating new masters and, effectively, by taking back the property. of his own work.
The newly recorded debut batch of Swift’s music is scheduled to arrive on April 9 and will be a remake of her 2008 album Fearless, with six period-unreleased tracks also included.
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