Taylor Swift is much more than a pop artist with sweet melodies and slick choreography. She is a formidable warrior. While her concerts are stormed and the feature film devoted to her tour released in thousands of cinemas in the United States has attracted more admissions than the last Scorsese with Brad Pitt and Robert De Niro, the singer most popular in the world is knocking out the Shamrock Capital investment fund. How ? Quite simply by devaluing part of the war chest that these financial aces had amassed by purchasing the star’s first six albums at a high price. An unprecedented masterstroke in the very lucrative music business where the battle for property rights makes and breaks fortunes.
The case dates back to 2019 when Scooter Braun, Justin Bieber’s manager, associated with the very powerful Carlyle fund, got his hands on the Big Machine label created by the singer when she was 15 years old and which holds the rights to a large part of from its catalog. Less than a year later, the unscrupulous manager, whom the thirty-year-old also accused of harassment, sold the juicy rights for $300 million to Shamrock Capital, an investment company based in Los Angeles. But Taylor Swift, advised by an army of high-flying lawyers, detects a flaw: the fund only holds the rights to the Masters of the albums, that is to say the initial recordings.
“The artist then had the legal possibility of re-recording all these albums and of collecting, alone, the fruits of the sale. A legal sleight of hand that she coupled with a well-conducted communication operation “, explains Pierre Perot, senior lawyer and specialist in intellectual property rights at the August Debouzy firm. A daring bet which aims to devalue old recordings.
In the space of two years, the thirty-year-old has re-recorded four of these last six albums. Everyone was a hit. The album Fairless released this year sold 627,000 units, three more than the initial album. But the real hit is the album’s replica 1989 released at the beginning of November. In the space of a week, sales rose to nearly 1.7 million copies in the United States. This is the best launch of an album for any artist since 2015, according to Financial Times. And as we must always learn the lessons of our mistakes, the American artist, now housed at Universal Music, signed a contract where it is written in black and white that she very carefully retains the rights to all the Masters of these future new recordings.