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    Taylor Swift Never Rerecorded ‘Reputation.’ Thank God.

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    After buying back her master recordings, the superstar says she has no plans to finish remaking her sixth album — her most inventive, shocking and risky yet.“Reputation,” Taylor Swift’s rowdy and sly 2017 document of exasperation and recrimination followed by blooming love, is, in a deep catalog of very fine albums, her finest. It is profoundly and disorientingly effective — sinister and hilarious and almost lighthearted in its viciousness — and also an experimental release from a superstar who had previously largely steered clear of formal risk.“Reputation” broke all of Swift’s formulas, taking her from an underdog prodigy who treated every win as an unexpected thrill to a pop star willing to play in the mud (and hurl it at her enemies). It may not be her most representative work, but it demonstrates her versatility and her ability to engage with the predominant sound of the moment, and reveals a snarl that had previously gone unseen.Last Friday, Swift announced that she would not be making a new recording of “Reputation” to join her Taylor’s Versions of “Fearless,” “Speak Now,” “Red” and “1989.” Those releases are the result of a long-running battle over the ownership of the master recordings of her first six albums. Swift has now acquired those assets — in a deal reportedly worth about $360 million, according to Billboard — so she no longer needs to produce an alternate version to draw fan interest away from the originals.Which means she no longer needs to tinker with memory, either. The Taylor’s Version projects were foundationally ahistoric, grand-scale curios that muddied the place Swift’s originals held in the public consciousness. They also implied, via force, that Swift’s original artistry was somehow insufficient. And it relegated old recordings to relic status, largely in the interest of commercial concerns.What they succeeded at, however, was acknowledging that for an artist with several generations of fans, some older material might benefit from a refresh and a reintroduction. The commercial and chart success of these albums — her remake of “1989” had a larger opening week than the original, the equivalent of 1,653,000 sales in the United States — suggested that old work, rethought and repackaged, could be as lucrative as new songs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Taylor Swift Buys Her Masters From Shamrock Capital, Reclaiming the Rights to Her First 6 Albums

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      The master recordings to the pop superstar’s earliest work were sold to Scooter Braun in 2019, and acquired a year later by the investing firm Shamrock Capital.It was a business deal that led to one of the most ambitious recording projects in pop: When Taylor Swift’s catalog was sold in 2019 as part of a larger acquisition of the Nashville record company Big Machine, she said she would redo all of the affected albums to maintain some control over her creative work.Now the original recordings are hers again.On Friday, Swift announced on her website that she had bought her masters back from Shamrock Capital, the Los Angeles-based investment firm that was founded by Roy E. Disney, a nephew of Walt Disney. She did not disclose the price.“I can’t thank you enough for helping to reunite me with this art that I have dedicated my life to, but have never owned until now,” she wrote to fans. “The best things that have ever been mine … finally actually are.”In her statement, Swift said she now had ownership of all of her music videos, concert films, album art and photography and unreleased songs.Shamrock acquired the rights to Swift’s first six albums — “Taylor Swift” (2006), “Fearless” (2008), “Speak Now” (2010), “Red” (2012), “1989” (2014)” and “Reputation” (2017) — in 2020 from Scooter Braun, the music manager who shepherded Justin Bieber’s career and had worked with the longtime Swift adversary Kanye West, and his company Ithaca Holdings.Braun’s 2019 deal for the Big Machine Label Group, founded by Scott Borchetta and also home to country artists like Florida Georgia Line, Rascal Flatts and Thomas Rhett, was estimated at $300 million. Shamrock paid more than $300 million for Swift’s catalog, according to a person briefed on the deal.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hackers Stole $635,000 in Taylor Swift Ticket Scheme, Queens D.A. Says

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      Two people stand accused of taking hundreds of tickets from StubHub to redirect them to others who resold them, prosecutors said.Two people accused of stealing and reselling more than 900 tickets to the Taylor Swift Eras Tour and other marquee events are facing criminal charges for their role in the scheme, New York prosecutors said.Several people were involved in hacking into the computer system of the online ticket-sales platform StubHub starting in the summer of 2022, the Queens district attorney, Melinda Katz, said in a news release on Monday. They then resold the tickets on the same platform for a profit, which added up to $635,000.Tyrone Rose, 20, of Kingston, Jamaica, and Shamara P. Simmons, 31, of the New York City neighborhood of Jamaica, Queens, were arrested and arraigned on Feb. 27 in Criminal Court in Queens. The lawyers listed for them in court documents did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Mr. Rose and Ms. Simmons were both charged with second-degree grand larceny, first-degree computer tampering, fourth-degree conspiracy and fourth-degree computer tampering.Mr. Rose worked for an outsourcing company in Kingston, Sutherland Global Services, which was contracted by StubHub, according to the criminal complaint.Mr. Rose and a co-worker, who has not been arrested or publicly identified, used their access to part of StubHub’s ticketing system to find a way into a secure part of the network that they were not authorized to use, where information about ticket orders was stored.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Match the Taylor Swift Song to the Poem Inspired By Her Music

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      In honor of Madison Cloudfeather Nye Somehow the voices twined around a young mind encouraging gentle stanzas, open endings, even in a Texas town where they wanted you to testify before cashing a check. Heck with that, boys. I’m heading out in my little gray boots, slim volumes of poetry in my holster, William of […] More

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      Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Made a Record $2 Billion of Ticket Sales

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      Over 21 months, the pop superstar’s culture-dominating stage show doubled the gross of its closest competitor, according to ticket sales figures confirmed for the first time.For the last 21 months, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour has been the biggest thing in music — a phenomenon that has engulfed pop culture, dominated news coverage and boosted local economies around the world.Now we know exactly how big.Through its 149th and final show, which took place in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Sunday, Swift’s tour sold a total of $2,077,618,725 in tickets. That’s two billion and change — double the gross ticket sales of any other concert tour in history and an extraordinary new benchmark for a white-hot international concert business.Those figures were confirmed to The New York Times for the first time by Taylor Swift Touring, the singer’s production company. While the financial details of the Eras Tour have been a subject of constant industry speculation since tickets were first offered more than two years ago — through a presale so in-demand it crashed Ticketmaster’s system — Swift has never authorized disclosure of the tour’s numbers until now.The official results are not far from the estimates that trade journalists and industry analysts have been crunching for months. But they solidify the enormous scale of Swift’s accomplishment. Just a few months ago, Billboard magazine reported that Coldplay had set an industry record with $1 billion in ticket sales for its 156-date Music of the Spheres World Tour — a figure that is just half of Swift’s total for a similar stretch of shows in stadiums and arenas.Every date on the Eras Tour was sold out, and spare tickets were scalped at eye-popping prices — or traded within the protective Swiftie fan community, often at face value.According to Swift’s touring company, a total of 10,168,008 people attended the concerts, which means that, on average, each seat went for about $204. That is well above the industry average of $131 for the top 100 tours around the world in 2023, according to Pollstar, a trade publication.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      For Taylor Swift, It’s the End of the ‘Eras’

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      Anyone with an ear tuned to the world of pop music knew the Eras Tour was going to be a big one.It was Taylor Swift’s first tour in almost five years, the longest gap of her career. And Swift, long the biggest star in pop music, had become even bigger, transcending the Top 40 to become a cultural phenomenon.Moreover, this tour would include extensive music, not just from her most recent album, “Midnights,” but from her entire career, from the country of “Fearless” to the pop of “1989” to the indie pop of “Folklore.”The first concert came in March 2023 in Glendale, Ariz., and it was even bigger than anyone imagined: three hours, 15 minutes without intermission and more than 40 songs.And the excitement just kept building, with frenzied anticipation in every city, attendance records broken and vast economic impacts in regions and even entire countries.Tickets vanished in seconds, then quickly popped up on the secondary market at 10 times the price. Fans who couldn’t obtain or afford tickets came to the venues anyway, content to commune with others like them and sing along with the amplified music coming from inside.Now, almost two years later, the tour is coming to an end on Sunday night in Vancouver, Canada.The atmosphere outside the concert venue on Saturday night was friendly and bubbly.Alana Paterson for The New York TimesHayley Pallin from Oregon came with her family to watch the concert.Alana Paterson for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Year in Pop: Hits Without Stars, Stars Without Hits

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      This past spring, Tommy Richman got famous off a TikTok.Well, not famous exactly. Popular. Let’s say popular. Tommy Richman got popular off a TikTok.Or maybe that’s not quite right either. How about: This past spring, a snippet of a song used in a video on TikTok catapulted Richman, a young soul singer with some promising earlier releases, onto the path to fame.The snippet was of “Million Dollar Baby,” a deliciously saccharine pop-funk thumper, and the TikTok it soundtracked was a loose clip of Richman and his friends having a fantastic time in the studio one night — a warm little bolt of you-shoulda-been-there fun. This was in April, and before long, the clip had millions of views, and the audio was inescapable. Eventually, it appeared in over nine million videos on the app. Radio play followed quickly, leading to a No. 2 debut for the song on the Billboard Hot 100, followed by a few months in the Top 10.Stardom secured, right? Not quite. While “Million Dollar Baby” is one of this year’s defining singles, Richman remains largely a cipher. He hasn’t done many interviews; he had a needless social-media kerfuffle over how people taxonomize his sound; and his debut studio album, “Coyote” — which pointedly and stubbornly did not include “Million Dollar Baby” or its follow-up cousin, “Devil Is a Lie” — arrived with a whisper in September, and disappeared even more quietly.Tommy Richman’s “Million Dollar Baby” blew up on TikTok and hit the Hot 100, but didn’t appear on his debut studio album.Craig Barritt/Getty ImagesThis isn’t to consign Richman to pop’s deep bin of one-hit wonders. If anything, the current pathway for breakout successes, especially via TikTok, is more insidious than that. Viral smashes like “Million Dollar Baby” often feel like hits without stars — potent for soundtracking and sticking to content made by others rather than attached to the artist who actually created it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Best Albums of 2024: Charli XCX, Mk.gee, MJ Lenderman and More

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      Charli XCX, Mk.gee and MJ Lenderman top our pop music critics’ lists this year.Jon Pareles | Jon Caramanica | Lindsay ZoladzJon ParelesConcepts, Craftsmanship, Sensuality and Tidings of ApocalypseThe agendas for 21st-century musicians keep getting more complicated. They can try to out-game streaming and social media algorithms, stoking the celebrity-industrial complex or steadfastly ignoring it. They can lean into idiosyncratic artistic instincts and intuitions. They can channel the zeitgeist or defy it. Of course, listeners have choices as well. For me, there was no definitive musical statement for 2024, no obvious pathbreaker. But there were plenty of purposeful, heartfelt, exacting and inspired individual statements. I gave the top slot to a project that strove mightily to unite a glossy sonic (and online) presence with surprising confessions. But song for song, the rest of the list can easily stand alongside it. And if there’s more than a little apocalyptic gloom in these choices, well, that’s 2024.1. Charli XCX, ‘Brat’ and ‘Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat’The year’s conceptual coup belonged to Charli XCX. “Brat,” the album she released in June, used dance-floor beats, blippy synthetic hooks and meme-ready graphics as she assessed just where she stood as a pop striver in her 30s, more than a decade into her career: pushing, partying, wondering whether to set it all aside to have a baby. Somehow, “Brat” landed as a full-fledged hit — and by September, Charli XCX had rewritten all the tracks and added star collaborators, dispensing hooks while trying to keep a level head about success. Amid all the hyperpop gloss and online chatter, she still sounded honest.2. Brittany Howard, ‘What Now’Brittany Howard’s second solo album tackles the contours of a relationship that is fizzling out.Ariel Fisher for The New York TimesBrittany Howard lays out the ragged emotions of a crumbling relationship on “What Now”: numbness, mourning, second-guessing, guilt and furtive glimmers of relief. While the tracks are rooted in soul, rock, R&B, funk and disco, they turn familiar styles inside-out with targeted distortion and surreal, displaced mixes. The songs capture all the disorientation that comes with a life-changing decision.3. Vampire Weekend, ‘Only God Was Above Us’Vampire Weekend’s once-meticulous musical universe gets punctured by noise on “Only God Was Above Us.” Its fifth album grapples with how what used to be called indie-rock can face a new pop landscape, and how determined innovators can keep pushing themselves. The answers include history lessons, quasi-sequitur lyrics and constantly morphing studio arrangements — a running, enlightening battle between strict song structure and an unruly world.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Book Review: ‘Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music,’ by Rob Sheffield

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      HEARTBREAK IS THE NATIONAL ANTHEM: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music, by Rob SheffieldIt’s possible that I know too much about Taylor Swift. I know the words to all her singles and every name on her long list of ex-lovers. Thanks to her current relationship with Travis Kelce, I know details about the various social entanglements of his Kansas City Chiefs teammates that I would prefer not to. I listen to her music about as much as the median American, which is to say: all of the time. Swift has become America’s Muzak, her songs the soundtrack to our Starbucks lines and her life the fodder for our tabloid stories.In “Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music,” Rob Sheffield charts how Swift, who rose to fame writing songs for teenage girls (when she was still one herself), became ubiquitous — and he makes the case that even as her cultural dominance can work to obscure her skill, everything always leads back to her virtuosic writing.Sheffield is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, where he publishes consistently glowing reviews of Swift’s seemingly limitless offerings. Here he steps back to consider the roots of her appeal. Swift has “always had a unique flair for writing songs in which people hear themselves — her music keeps crossing generational and cultural boundaries, in ways that are often mystifying,” he writes. She makes her “experiences public property, to the point where she makes the world think of her as a character.”Swift’s self-mythologizing stretches beyond her music to become a collaborative storytelling prompt, one that manages to absorb even her critics. As her superfans brand themselves as “Swifties” and build an extended Taylorverse of analysis and intrigue on social media, they recruit her haters into their project, using them to cast their billionaire idol as a complex and scrappy protagonist.A character becomes more interesting when she has challengers and flaws. “Taylor’s hubris, her way-too-muchness, her narcissism disguised as even more narcissism, her inability to Not Be Taylor for a microsecond — it’s a lot,” Sheffield writes. “You can’t fully appreciate her without appreciating the wide range of visceral reactions she brings out in people.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More