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    Taylor Swift’s Rerecording of ’1989’ May Be Her Biggest Yet. Here’s Why.

    The pop superstar’s new version of her 2014 blockbuster is due Friday, following a summer of media saturation and her 10th No. 1 hit.Taylor Swift’s “1989” has been a fixture in the Top 20 of Billboard’s album chart for months. Stuffed with some of the singer’s biggest pop hits, like “Shake It Off” and “Blank Space,” the LP was a gargantuan hit when it was released in 2014, and this year Swift has been performing its songs on her record-breaking Eras Tour.But “1989” is about to make an all-but-certain plunge down the chart.Listen to This ArticleOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.That’s because on Friday, Swift will release “1989 (Taylor’s Version),” the latest installment in her ambitious and wildly successful project to rerecord her first six studio albums. What began a few years ago as an attempt to reclaim her music — and, perhaps, have a taste of revenge — after the sale of her former record label has become a blockbuster enterprise all its own, with punishing consequences for the original recordings.“1989” will be the fourth of Swift’s remakes, and each one so far has opened at No. 1 with successively bigger numbers. In early 2021, “Fearless” started with the equivalent of 291,000 sales in the United States. “Red,” anchored by a smoldering, 10-minute extended version of the song “All Too Well,” had 605,000 later that year. “Speak Now” came out in July and started with 716,000 sales, including a remarkable 268,500 copies sold on vinyl LP.Each one has arrived with deluxe packaging, a rainbow of colored vinyl variants and a thick appendix of “vault” bonus tracks that have given fans abundant material to discuss and decode — not to mention well-timed batches of themed merchandise. Among the items Swift is selling at her online store are a sweater decorated with sea gulls (à la the new album cover), for $74.89, and a device like an old-fashioned View-Master, for $19.89.How big “1989” could be is anyone’s guess, and her label, Republic Records, declined to offer any projections. But given the trajectory of the previous remakes, the enduring popularity of the songs on the original album and Swift’s near-total saturation of popular culture this year — in just the past few weeks, she released a hit concert film, reached No. 1 with a four-year-old song and has nearly upstaged the N.F.L. through her relationship with Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs — the music industry is bracing for a monster debut, even in a year that has had major albums by Morgan Wallen, Drake, Olivia Rodrigo and Travis Scott.Swift has been stoking demand for “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” since announcing it in August, partnering with Google for an online puzzle to reveal clues about the album’s “vault” tracks; naturally, it crashed within hours.When Swift first spoke about her intention to rerecord her albums, in summer 2019 — shortly after the music manager Scooter Braun bought Big Machine, Swift’s original label, for a bit over $300 million — the music world scratched its collective head; most previous attempts at rerecordings had had little success. But when the new version of “Fearless” came out — by which time Braun had sold Swift’s recording rights to the investment firm Shamrock Capital — it became another lesson in Swift’s mastery in rallying her fan base.“When the rerecord process started with her, it was this curiosity, where no one really knew what it could do,” said Keith Caulfield, Billboard’s managing director of charts and data operations. “But they have turned into a phenomenon unto themselves.”Swift’s world tour, which has played to packed stadiums since March and is in line to sell well over $1 billion in tickets by the time it ends next year, has generally lifted her entire catalog. At various times this year, at least 10 of her albums, including the originals, have been in the Billboard 200, the magazine’s flagship albums chart.But each time Swift has released a rerecorded album, its corresponding original version has suffered. In the year after she released “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” sales of the original fell 20 percent in the United States, according to Luminate, the tracking service that supplies the data for Billboard’s charts; the original “Red” dropped by about 45 percent. Neither has been on the Billboard 200 since 2021.Jaime Marconette, Luminate’s senior director of music insights and industry relations, noted how stark that impact can be on a week-to-week basis. In May, Swift said she would release a new “Speak Now” in eight weeks. “That announcement,” Marconette said, “immediately drove a 75.7 percent increase in total consumption for the original version.” But as soon as “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)” came out, the original sank. Comparing a window of 14 weeks before and after the new version, the original fell 59 percent.On the latest chart, the new “Speak Now” is No. 18. The old version, which was most recently No. 191, had fallen off the chart entirely.Statistics like that call into question the value of Shamrock’s investment, which has been estimated at more than $300 million. In the short term, at least, there is no doubt that Swift’s rerecordings have severely dimmed the originals. But it may take years before it is clear whether there is a lasting impact. A spokeswoman for Shamrock said that no one at the firm was available to discuss the matter.Swift also stands to earn more money from her new recordings than her old ones, thanks to a deal she negotiated with Universal Music, Republic’s parent company, that gave her ownership rights to her recordings.As Swift’s new “1989” nears release, the singer has been promoting it steadily on social media, this week sharing an image of handwritten lyrics that fans have interpreted as being from an unreleased track. And truckloads of vinyl and CD copies of the new album have been making their way to brick-and-mortar stores.Even indie record shops are primed to do huge business with the new “1989,” as they have with all of Swift’s recent releases. Carl Mello of Newbury Comics, a music and collectibles chain that has 30 stores throughout the Northeast, said that for some of Swift’s previous albums, problems in the supply chain have meant that stores did not always have her records on release day. But those issues have been resolved, and the chain expects to have about 1,600 copies ready for sale on Friday.“I’ve been at Newbury Comics for just over 30 years, and I’ve never seen somebody who has occupied so many spots in our Top 40 vinyl records list at the same time, consistently for months and months,” Mello said.“It wouldn’t surprise me if Taylor Swift is 15 percent of our vinyl sales,” he added. “It’s extraordinary.”Audio produced by More

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    Taylor Swift Announces Fourth Album Rerecording During Eras Tour

    Swift announced the October release of “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” during a concert in California on Wednesday.It’s Taylor Swift’s summer. We’re all just living in it.During a concert for her Eras Tour in California on Wednesday night, Swift announced the release date of “1989 (Taylor’s Version),” a rerecording of her 2014 album, “1989.” It will come out on Oct. 27, the same date that the original album was released nine years ago.It should come as no surprise that fans, both in the stadium and on the internet, freaked out.“Surprise!!” Swift wrote on social media. “The 1989 album changed my life in countless ways, and it fills me with such excitement to announce that my version of it will be out October 27th.” She added that this was her “most FAVORITE rerecord I’ve ever done.”The album includes hits like “Shake It Off” and “Blank Space.”Taylor Swift announcing #1989TaylorsVersion tonight at SoFi Stadium! #LATStheerastour #TSTheErasTour pic.twitter.com/zCSzcEWT2b— The Eras Tour (@TSTheErasTour) August 10, 2023
    Swift has been rerecording her first six albums to regain control of them after the master recordings were sold. In 2019, the music executive Scooter Braun purchased Big Machine, Swift’s old label — and with it, the original recordings for Swift’s first six albums. The sale, Swift said at the time, had “stripped me of my life’s work.”Since then, the back catalog has changed hands again. Braun’s company sold the rights to Swift’s music to Shamrock Capital, an investment firm founded by Roy E. Disney, a nephew of Walt Disney, for more than $300 million.In 2019, Swift announced her plan to rerecord the albums, and she has since released “Fearless,” “Red” and “Speak Now.”Announcing the new version of “Fearless” in 2021, Swift wrote on Twitter that, “Artists should own their own work for so many reasons, but the most screamingly obvious one is that the artist is the only one who really knows that body of work.”That album, called “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” came with six additional songs that were not featured on the original “Fearless,” Swift’s 2009 mainstream breakthrough that won four Grammy Awards.Now, Swift is in the middle of her Eras Tour, which has become an international business and cultural juggernaut this summer, with fans clamoring for tickets and demand putting ticketing systems under stress.The show Wednesday night was the sixth at SoFi stadium outside Los Angeles, and the final one in the first United States leg of the tour. (More shows are planned in the United States in fall 2024.) Swift’s next shows will be in Mexico this month, with later dates in Argentina, Brazil, Japan and Europe. In total, 146 stadium dates have been booked for the Eras Tour.Although Swift’s box office numbers aren’t publicly released, the trade publication Pollstar has estimated that Eras Tour earnings will surpass $1 billion when she gets to Singapore in March.Swift fans — or “Swifties” — are known to see signs in everything Swift does or posts online, and they had speculated that she might announce her rerecording of “1989” on Wednesday night. SoFi Stadium had also teased a “surprise” on social media. More

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    Taylor Swift’s Rerecorded Album Releases Begin With ‘Fearless’ in April

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTaylor Swift’s Rerecorded Album Releases Begin With ‘Fearless’ in AprilAfter her first six albums were sold to investors, Swift said she would record entirely new versions of her old songs that she would own.Taylor Swift onstage during her Fearless Tour at Madison Square Garden in New York. The singer is rereleasing a new version of the album, which first came out in 2008.Credit…Chad Batka for The New York TimesFeb. 11, 2021Following through on a threat that rattled the music business and kick-started industrywide conversations about artistic ownership, Taylor Swift announced on Thursday that she would release a newly recorded version of “Fearless,” her second and most successful album, as part of a long-term plan to control her old songs outright.“This process has been more fulfilling and emotional than I could’ve imagined and has made me ever more determined to re-record all of my music,” said the singer, 31, in a statement on social media. She added that the rollout of her rerecordings would begin at midnight with the release of a fresh take on the song “Love Story” — now called “Love Story (Taylor’s Version)” — her first Billboard Top 10 single, just in time for Valentine’s Day.“Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” will be released April 9 and feature 26 songs total, including hits like “You Belong With Me” and “Fifteen,” along with six unreleased tracks written when Swift was a teenager. “‘Fearless’ was an album full of magic and curiosity, the bliss and devastation of youth,” Swift wrote.I’m thrilled to tell you that my new version of Fearless (Taylor’s Version) is done and will be with you soon. It has 26 songs including 6 never before released songs from the vault. Love Story (Taylor’s Version) will be out tonight. Pre-order now at https://t.co/NqBDS6cGFl 💛💛 pic.twitter.com/Vjyy2gA72O— Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) February 11, 2021
    First released in 2008 by the Nashville label Big Machine, “Fearless” represented Swift’s mainstream breakthrough outside of country music and won four Grammy Awards, including album of the year, on its way to selling more than 10 million copies in the United States. Like most artists, Swift did not then control the rights to her recordings, which belonged to the label, though she held some ownership, along with her songwriting collaborators, of the separate rights for her songs’ compositions, known as publishing.In 2019, not long after Swift signed a different contract with Universal Music Group that gave her the rights to her masters moving forward, the powerful music executive Scooter Braun purchased Big Machine — and with it, the master recordings to Swift’s first six multiplatinum albums — in a $300 million deal that included an investment from the private-equity firm Carlyle Group.At the time, Swift said that the deal “stripped me of my life’s work,” and put her catalog “in the hands of someone who tried to dismantle it.” (Braun, who represents artists like Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande, previously worked with Kanye West, a longtime rival of Swift’s; she accused Braun of “incessant, manipulative bullying,” which he denied.) Her fans reacted with a public pressure campaign on social media.Swift’s back catalog has since changed hands again: Braun’s company Ithaca Holdings sold the rights to Swift’s music — the albums “Taylor Swift,” “Fearless,” “Speak Now,” “Red,” “1989” and “Reputation” — to Shamrock Capital, an investment firm founded by Roy E. Disney, a nephew of Walt Disney, for more than $300 million. Swift said she declined an offer to partner with Shamrock, citing Braun’s continued financial involvement.But before the second sale, Swift had already indicated that she planned to create a new set of master recordings that closely matched the ones she did not own, thus potentially devaluing the original assets.The owner of a master recording controls its use, including selling albums or licensing songs for movies, television, advertisements or video games. While an artist may still earn royalties on those recordings, record companies have historically retained rights to masters in exchange for the financial risks they take in supporting and promoting an artist.By creating new master recordings of her older songs, Swift, one of the most powerful celebrities in music and beyond, cannot only urge her loyal legions of fans to stream and buy the versions she owns, but may also encourage brands, filmmakers and other potential corporate partners to avoid using the originals. In December, Swift previewed the new “Love Story” in an ad for the dating service Match.Swift is not the first artist to try such a maneuver, though she may be the highest profile and most dedicated to the project. Standard recording contracts typically include terms that bar artists from releasing rerecorded work for three to five years, or more, from its initial release — restrictions that became common after the Everly Brothers put out fresh versions of past hits on a new label in the early 1960s.Since then, the band Def Leppard released what it called “forgeries” of its biggest hits during a dispute with its label, while the pop singer Jojo put out newly recorded versions of her first two albums, which were not available on streaming services, in 2018, after her rerecording clauses ran out.Swift said on “Good Morning America” in 2019 that her contracts allowed for her to rerecord her first five albums beginning in November 2020. “I think that artists deserve to own their work,” she said. “I just feel very passionately about that.”Artists including Prince, Janet Jackson and Jay-Z had previously emphasized the importance of musicians owning their own masters; Swift’s public missives on the issue seemed to revitalize the conversation for a new generation. In 2018, upon leaving Big Machine, where she first signed at age 15, Swift announced a multi-album agreement with Universal Music Group and its subsidiary, Republic Records, where she would own her recordings.That deal covered “Lover,” from 2019, and Swift’s two pandemic albums from last year, “Folklore” and “Evermore.” The singer has six nominations at the Grammys next month, including album of the year for “Folklore” — her fourth career nod in that category and possibly her third win.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More