Taylor Swift

[askye]

She's not alone in the issue of owning her music. Most artists who contend with it take ownership once they get it and hold on to it for all future recordings.

To be fair, most artists are given a fair opportunity to buy the rights to the original masters from the label once a certain number of years have passed.

In Taylor's case, it sounds like she was not given a fair opportunity to buy her original masters back, even though she obviously had the funds to do so:

Swift is blaming not just Braun but also Borchetta [the label head,] whom she accuses of betraying her loyalty. She says she begged for the opportunity to buy her masters back from Big Machine Records. But the only offer Big Machine gave her, she says, was the chance to earn her masters back one record at a time, so that she would have to release an entirely new album through Big Machine in order to get back the masters to just one of her old albums.

That offer, Swift says, was unacceptable to her, because she knew that Borchetta was going to sell Big Machine soon — “I knew once I signed that contract, Scott Borchetta would sell the label, thereby selling me and my future,” she writes — and she didn’t want to commit her future career to an unknown party.

Swift also says that Borchetta knew she didn’t trust Braun, that Borchetta gave her no advance warning of his plans to sell to Braun, and that she only learned about the acquisition when the news went public.

[ahah]

Nov 17, 2021 19:33:23 GMT -4 eveschmeve said:

She’s not the only artist, nope. But she’s one of the only ones with enough money, influence, and power to stand up for herself, and hopefully she paves the way for others. I also don’t see how she poked and poked someone over this. She wanted to buy her own music, she offered to buy her own music, and wasn’t allowed to. She signed a contract when she was a child, single handedly built a record label through her own success, and then wasn’t allowed to buy the rights to the songs she wrote. Who hit who?

With the poking, I'm not talking about the music industry part. That's the way the business works, and a lot of people choose to give up what is theirs in return for fame.

With the poking, I'm talking about rallying all her fans around obsessing over her ex boyfriends and going after them as big bad meanies because they broke up with her.

[Ladybug]

May 18, 2021 10:34:59 GMT -4 ahah said:

rallying all her fans around obsessing over her ex boyfriends

How did she do this exactly? Did she encourage them to harass Jake?

[granolamom]

WaPo summarizes the situation for people like me, who are only vaguely aware of Taylor Swift's offstage life. It seems that she doesn't need to encourage her fans to do anything; she leaves clues for them and the fans follow up. From the article: "Over the last decade, as the song [All Too Well] became a classic in the Swift catalogue, fans have taken great pleasure in lightly tormenting Gyllenhaal, whom Swift expertly roasted throughout multiple songs on the album. "

[famvir]

I just read that Jake and Taylor dated for like two months 11 years ago. So…who cares? When I was 20 I dated a divorced 31 yo guy with two kids. We went out for about 5 months. He kept talking about how he wanted to lock me up in a cabin away from everything and have me to himself.

I dumped him because… eww….

My thing is, at 20 Swift wasn’t a doe eyed virgin. She was a seasoned professional in charge of her own business. And Jake wasn’t a shifty eyed cradle robber taking advantage. He was a 29 yo actor who met a woman he respected and was attracted to. It sounds like he didn’t like all the press, which checks out seeing as how Swift is still digging this whole thing up 12 years later.

And the 15 yo Swifties (or whatever her fans were called), are now 26 yo women that should have enough life experience to realize the boy they dated in high school over the summer Junior year had no baring on the mid 20’s person they are now.

I don’t even remember who I dated when I was in my late teens/early 20’s, and I was engaged to three guys!

[eveschmeve]

To be fair to Taylor, had she been allowed to purchase her own music none of this would have to happen. The only reason it’s happening is that she had to re-record her songs so she could own them again. She’s not bringing it back up again for fun or because she really can’t stand Jake Gyllenhaal. All Too Well is considered one of her best songs, if not the best song she’s ever written, and the 10 minute version was always something she hinted at. I always find it weird that Taylor is picked on for writing songs about her exes as if it’s a very rare thing that no other musician does. No one goes around yelling about men who write songs like this, but somehow she gets singled out for criticism.

[alpierce]

Many recording artists do this for these reasons. Swift is hardly the first.

[ahah]

Nov 18, 2021 14:14:35 GMT -4 Ladybug said:

May 18, 2021 10:34:59 GMT -4 ahah said:

rallying all her fans around obsessing over her ex boyfriends

How did she do this exactly? Did she encourage them to harass Jake?

Yes. When you’ve got fans as devoted as she knows hers are, and she centers the promotion of an album over a song she knows they know is about him, that’s exactly what she’s doing. She markets loyalty to her as being fighting her fights.

Nov 18, 2021 18:14:52 GMT -4 eveschmeve said:

To be fair to Taylor, had she been allowed to purchase her own music none of this would have to happen. The only reason it’s happening is that she had to re-record her songs so she could own them again. She’s not bringing it back up again for fun or because she really can’t stand Jake Gyllenhaal. All Too Well is considered one of her best songs, if not the best song she’s ever written, and the 10 minute version was always something she hinted at. I always find it weird that Taylor is picked on for writing songs about her exes as if it’s a very rare thing that no other musician does. No one goes around yelling about men who write songs like this, but somehow she gets singled out for criticism.

There’s no sales requirement for her to own the music, right? So she could record it all again, release it as a legal move rather than a marketing one, and she’d own it. The promotion to make the rehash a huge sales boom is about her ego, not the technicality needed to own her music.

And I don’t rip on her for writing about her exes. I rip on her for all the clues and desperate need for everyone to figure out who she’s talking about. It goes from self expression to self obsession.

[cabbagekid]

I really loved her 10 minute version of All Too Well. I’ve never listened to the original version she released, but this 10 minute song took you through the entire journey of her relationship. Lord knows, I’ve written things in old journals about my relationships that made me cringe. The difference between Taylor and me is no one else knows what I wrote. I make my money in healthcare, not off writing and releasing things based off my experience.

I don’t mind that she’s re-recording her albums, especially if it’s to get ownership back of them. Streaming platforms have really changed music. Ownership of music didn’t really matter before because even if Scooter Braun bought the rights and I bought a physical copy of her record, Taylor would get a cut of my purchase. Now with Spotify or Pandora or Apple Music, the streams of her music pays Scooter (or whoever owns her old albums now).

Also, what Taylor is changing the game when labels like Universal are changing how contracts are drawn up so that new artists would have to wait longer than Taylor did if they want to re-record their album. Taylor’s wait time to re-record her album was standard, labels are now changing the standard because of what she’s doing.

The only thing I do blame Taylor on is she could tell her fans to stop harassing Joe, Jake, John, and her other exes. It’s so easy to say something like “I wrote these songs years ago when I was in the middle of my emotions. It’s years later and those relationships helped me grow to who I am today. I’m in a stable, happy relationship. And I wish them well.”

Even one of her fans sent a message to John Mayer, he actually replied something like “do you really want me to die?” And the fan took what they said back. She was just playing around and didn’t think he’d see her message. Most of Taylor’s fans are adults now and grew up with her, she could very easily drop Easter eggs for them to act in the “we go high when they go low” manner.

[Ladybug]

May 18, 2021 10:34:59 GMT -4 ahah said:

I rip on her for all the clues and desperate need for everyone to figure out who she’s talking about. It goes from self expression to self obsession.

This is just a perspective I don't get. There is so much out there about her love life that it's not rocket science to figure out who she's talking about. Fandoms can be insane echo chambers. I still don't see her encouraging people to harass her exes. She's an artist, the song is obviously based on her life and the video seems to be as well. This is not unique to Taylor Swift either, people have been trying to figure out who "You're so Vain" is about and there are a bunch of clues in that song as well. It hasn't hurt Warren Beatty or Mick Jagger to be the suspected cad in the song. People figured out that Ed Sheeran wrote "Don't" about Ellie Goudling.

This has me thinking back to a quote I saw years ago and saved: “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

I have zero problems with Taylor writing about past boyfriends. They have publicists and security teams and the power of their own celebrity to protect them. It's hard for me to scratch up sympathy for Jake Gyllenhaal and John Mayer or any other guy she's dated.