Taylor swift manager is selling her “masters” ,what is a masters?
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Song ownership is broken into two parts. Usually artists only own 1 of the 2 parts
Part 1: The music and lyrics – The artist owns the melody and lyrics to the song, they wrote it, its theirs, they can sing it, or whatever.
Part 2: The actual recording – you know the actual song you hear on the radio (or wherever) that single recording thats on the album? That is the “master” its the actual recording of part 1. Usually this is owned by the music label–NOT the artist. Think of this as beings something “physical”. Its literally the actual recording of the song that went on the album
On the current situation:
Taylor Swift owns part 1, her previous label owns part 2. This is pretty common in music. The owner of part 2 sold her “masters” to someone else. This is 100% legitimate and normal, music ownership gets bought and sold regularly. There’s some quirks to her specific situation, but we’ll ignore that for now, and frankly, they aren’t that important.
What can she do:
The artist, since they own part 1, can, in an somewhat ironic way, re-record the song themselves and create new masters (they could also buy the old masters). Taylor Swift is allegedly re-recording, at her own expense, ALL of her old music she does not own the masters to. This is wildly unusual to do on such a large scale (over 60 songs) and will be costly, and will Not be identical to her original recordings, but she’ll own these new recordings.
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