‘Taylor’s Version’ is changing music industry contracts

Music labels Sony, Warner, and Universal are worried that the success of Taylor Swift’s re-recorded albums may encourage other artists to do so and diminish the value of the studio-owned original recordings.

The re-recordings (owned by Swift) have garnered millions of listeners and dollars and have simultaneously driven down the value of her original recordings (owned by Big Machine Music Group).

Swift has released four album re-recordings since April 2021 as “Taylor’s Version” and three of them, “Fearless,” “Red” and “Speak Now,” opened at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart, earning her more than $8 million in royalties every month, per Daily Mail.

Re-recording restrictions
Lawyers for music groups, including Cigarettes After Sex, Built to Spill, Jeff Rosenstock, The Toxhards and We the Commas, have noticed recording studios asking new artists who sign up with them to wait a couple of decades before they drop their re-recordings.

Musicians, on the other hand, are demanding lesser re-recording restrictions in their contracts.

Music studios usually handed out contracts that allowed musicians to release re-recordings five to seven years from the release date of the original or two years after the contract expired.