Taylor Swift buys back rights to her first 6 albums

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 Nashville, Tennessee, 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 Big Machine Label Group, founded by Scott Borchetta, was estimated at $300 million. Shamrock paid more than $300 million for Swift’s catalog, according to a person briefed on the deal.

In 2018, Swift signed a new deal with Universal Music Group and its subsidiary, Republic Records. She owns the master recordings made under that agreement, including for the albums “Lover” (2019), “Folklore” (2020), “Evermore” (2020), “Midnights” (2022) and “The Tortured Poets Department” from last year.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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