You and Bubble are the only ones diving on this and I appreciate it. I really do not like Taylor, but at one point I was her biggest fan. I will be resentful but happy if she was WH controlled opp this entire time

Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are the " hottest" topic right now. He's Mr .Phizer and , well she is Taylor Swift! Visibility- those 2. Kansas City Chiefs! And her making woman want to watch football! Hmmm?

SUBSCRIBE Search... SECTIONS Home U.S. Politics World Health Climate Future of Work by Charter Business Tech Entertainment Ideas Science History Sports Magazine TIME 2030 Next Generation Leaders TIME100 Leadership Series TIME Studios Video TIME100 Talks TIMEPieces The TIME Vault TIME for Health TIME for Kids TIME Edge TIME CO2 Red Border: Branded Content by TIME Coupons Personal Finance by TIME Stamped Shopping by TIME Stamped JOIN US Newsletters Subscribe Give a Gift Shop the TIME Store TIME Cover Store CUSTOMER CARE US & Canada Global Help Center REACH OUT Careers Press Room Contact the Editors Media Kit Reprints and Permissions MORE About Us Privacy Policy Your Privacy Rights Terms of Use Modern Slavery Statement Site Map CONNECT WITH US ENTERTAINMENT MUSIC Here’s Why Taylor Swift Is Re-Releasing Her Old Albums 7 MINUTE READ The album cover for 1989 Taylor's Version that shows Taylor Swift smiling with windblown hair with blue sky and birds flying behind her Background: Getty Images BY RAISA BRUNER UPDATED: OCTOBER 27, 2023 9:58 AM EDT | ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: MARCH 25, 2021 5:06 PM EDT If you pay close attention, you can hear it: there’s a new lushness in the opening banjo twangs, and an extra beat when she sings the lyric “Just say yes.” But the difference between the 2008 version of Taylor Swift’s “Love Story,” which helped propel Swift to pop stardom, and the 2021 rerelease of that same song is pretty subtle. Called “Taylor’s Version” on streaming platforms, the new mix was a part of Fearless (Taylor’s Version), which arrived in April 2021 as the first of the artist’s rerecordings of her back catalog. Next came Red (Taylor’s Version) in November of that year, and on July 7, 2023, her third and the halfway point in the project, Speak Now (Taylor’s Version). On Oct. 27, 2023, Swift released her version of 2014’s 1989.

More from TIME In these rerecordings, the lyrics and production haven’t changed that much: it’s Swift’s business that’s shifted. Now 33, Swift recently went through a full indie-pop era—as shown by her Grammy-winning turn on Folklore and her subsequent album, Evermore. More recently, she has embarked on her “Eras Tour,” which began in the spring of 2023 and will continue well into 2024, and has crashed Ticketmaster and dominated the summer’s cultural conversation.

But behind it all is an artist who’s been fighting for years now to manage the means, method of production, and distribution of her work. Art makes us feel things, a craft at which Swift is a master. Art also makes money, and Swift is equally adept at that. Her goal now: make sure it stays within her control. It’s a pipe dream for artists of any kind. But Swift has power that most don’t, and her very personal fight to reshape the way wealth is distributed from creative work is a potential model for wrestling compensation back from industry forces.

Swift signed to Big Machine Records in 2005, a fresh-faced Nashville singer with a guitar and long blond hair. The contract expired in 2018 but not before she rocketed to radio-play heights with hits like “I Knew You Were Trouble” and crossed into the pop stratosphere with sold-out stadium tours over the course of six albums. When her deal was up, she switched labels to Universal’s Republic Records. Big Machine owns the masters, or original recordings, of her first six albums, as is typical with many recording deals. In her new contract, Swift made sure to secure ownership of her future masters. Changing labels, carving out more agency, updating contract terms—these steps are par for the course for a successful artist. People change, and so do the contracts that govern them.

View this post on Instagram What is Taylor Swift’s dispute with her old label? But Swift’s behind-the-scenes moves became front-page news when Big Machine sold to private-equity group Ithaca Holdings, an entity owned by powerhouse music manager Scooter Braun. He then sold her masters to another company, Shamrock Holdings, for a reported $300 million in 2019. On a business level, Braun’s move was smart: Swift’s master recordings reap profits whenever the songs are streamed or bought. On the personal front, it was contentious: Swift claims Braun, who manages stars like Kanye West and Justin Bieber, has repeatedly bullied her, and so she slammed the sale publicly and promised to rerecord those original six albums, this time with the masters under her own control. Anyone who hits play on an old version of Swift’s early songs right now will still pay into the bank of Braun.

Most Popular from TIME Why is Taylor Swift re-recording her albums? Her hope, it seems, is to override those archival works with these new versions. “Artists should own their own work for so many reasons,” she wrote in a March 2021 Instagram post. “But the most screamingly obvious one is that the artist is the only one who really knows that body of work.” Her choice stirred up responses across the music world, and forced the public to take a long look at the music industry’s quiet corporate machinations.

Artists regularly chafe against their record label contracts; see Kanye West, who very publicly vented against his own contractual obligations in 2020 (before a series of escalating controversies moved the conversation further and further from his music). But rarely do they go through the hassle of re-recording and re-releasing old work. Swift, though, is not the usual artist. She had time—a whole year of it, while the pandemic put her touring schedule on pause. And she is meticulous about how her work is consumed and perceived, from the aesthetics of her album covers to the comments she makes on Tumblr fan blogs. Given her unique position, platforms like Spotify have everything to gain by supporting her new versions. Meanwhile, the fans who are the most active streamers of her old music have become well aware of her intentions—and will abide by her wishes. Swift is in the rare position to want to upend the system and actually have the power to do so.

What’s different about Taylor Swift’s new work? Not much; her re-recordings are, so far, faithful to their original versions—with some subtle production updates, and the newfound maturity in her voice that an extra decade has provided. Swift is also sharing a number of new tracks from what she calls her “vault,” beginning with “You All Over Me” with Maren Morris. Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) includes six songs from the vault, featuring Paramore’s Hayley Williams and Fall Out Boy’s Patrick Stump. The new release also includes a changed lyric following years of complaints that a line from “Better Than Revenge” could be read as slut-shaming.

What’s truly different about Swift’s “new” work is the intention behind it, and developments that have brought her to the place to own it. Every musician is a business, a startup with limited equity to portion out to labels, publishers and other stakeholders. As the business grows, the musician is left with a smaller and smaller piece of that pie. Greater equity was the central consideration of Swift’s label change—along with greater certainty that all who contributed to making the art itself would benefit from their work. “There was one condition that meant more to me than any other deal point,” she wrote at the time: ensuring that profits from the future sale of Spotify shares would be returned to artists. That this financial nitty-gritty is what excited Swift most might seem at odds with her image as a singer-songwriter who performs on sets that look like a cottage in a fairy-tale forest. But that persona hides Swift’s savvy: she’s long understood that artists, even those with brands as powerful as hers, are vulnerable to exploitation. After building an empire writing deeply personal songs, should selling her story really come so cheap?

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Subscribe now 2024 Trump Lists Out the Reasons Taylor Swift Should Endorse Him, as If That Might Actually Happen According to the ex-president, Swift owes him her loyalty because he made her “so much money.”

BY BESS LEVIN

FEBRUARY 12, 2024 LOS ANGELES CALIFORNIA OCTOBER 11 Taylor Swift attends Taylor Swift The Eras Tour Concert Movie World Premiere at AMC... LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - OCTOBER 11: Taylor Swift attends "Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour" Concert Movie World Premiere at AMC The Grove 14 on October 11, 2023 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images)MATT WINKELMEYER/GETTY IMAGES

SAVE Is Taylor Swift going to endorse Joe Biden? Given that she did in 2020, it’s obviously possible. And if you ask the MAGA nation’s more conspiratorially-minded members, the endorsement is already a done deal. But Taylor Swift endorsing Donald Trump is one thing that is clearly not going to happen, and the reason we know this is because, among other things, Swift vowed to “do everything” she could to end Trump’s reign of terror the last time he ran for president, i.e., her feelings for him are quite clear. And yet, that didn’t stop the former guy from taking to social media on Sunday to list out the reasons she should actually back him and not Biden.

In a deeply cringeworthy post on Truth Social, Trump wrote: “I signed and was responsible for the Music Modernization Act for Taylor Swift and all other Musical Artists. Joe Biden didn’t do anything for Taylor, and never will. There’s no way she could endorse Crooked Joe Biden, the worst and most corrupt President in the History of our Country, and be disloyal to the man who made her so much money. Besides that, I like her boyfriend, Travis, even though he may be a Liberal, and probably can’t stand me!”

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Let’s break down Trump’s reasons why Swift shouldn’t endorse Biden and should maybe even endorse him, which are, to use political jargon, “very dumb.”

He was “responsible for the Music Modernization Act” As Dina LaPolt, an attorney who worked on the MMA, noted yesterday, “Trump did nothing on our legislation except sign it, and doesn’t even know what the Music Modernization Act does. Someone should ask him what the bill actually accomplished.”

Joe Biden hasn’t “done anything” for her In Trump’s mind, everything is transactional, so because Biden hasn’t literally put money in Swift’s pocket, he hasn’t “done anything for her” and likely “never will.” Naturally, the ex-president does not consider the fact that (1) Swift agrees with Biden on a number of policy issues, and (2) when it comes to policies, she very much does not agree with Trump. For example, the singer is a major proponent of reproductive rights—which Biden has fought for, and Trump has bragged about destroying.

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To endorse Joe Biden would be “disloyal” to Trump because Trump “made her so much money” This claim is unintentionally hilarious on multiple levels. For starters, it suggests that Swift showed up at the White House begging Trump to sign the Music Modernization Act, which, of course, never happened, and now owes him her loyalty. Obviously, she owes Trump literally nothing, and again, for him, everything comes down to the question of whether someone has put cold, hard cash in someone else’s pocket.

Trump likes Travis Kelce, which is big of him given that Kelce “may be a Liberal” and “probably can’t stand” Trump Apparently, Swift shouldn’t endorse Biden because Trump is so magnanimous that he hasn’t shit all over Travis Kelce, despite the NFL star likely being a “a Liberal.” He could have, but he hasn’t! Probably already has a mean nickname just waiting to be deployed, but hasn’t used it! And this is how Taylor repays him??

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Bess Levin POLITICS CORRESPONDENT Bess Levin is a politics correspondent at Vanity Fair. An essential voice of our current tragicomedy, she is an incisive, hilarious daily narrator of the horrors that never seem to stop. If you need catharsis in these terrifying times—or even if you don’t!—she is a must-read. You can follow her... Read more SEE MORE BY BESS LEVIN » READ MORE TAKE YOUR TIGHT END TO WORK DAY Travis Kelce to Join Taylor Swift on Eras Tour: Report Win or lose at Sunday’s Super Bowl, the Kansas City Chiefs tight end has a slew of more stadiums in his future. BY EVE BATEY

LEVIN REPORT An Exasperated Pentagon Responds to the Taylor Swift Conspiracy Theories “Taylor Swift is not part of a DOD psychological operation. Period.” BY BESS LEVIN

ICON CELEBRITY The 15 Wildest Conspiracy Theories About Taylor Swift From Satanic cults to fake romances to evil twins, here are some of the most bizarre, startling and funny conspiracy theories about Taylor Swift. 15 SLIDES BY NEHA PRAKASH

STYLE Taylor Swift and Reba McEntire Aren't Fighting, Despite Reports to the Contrary McEntire says a viral claim that she tussled with Swift is a lie, as disgraced former Rep. George Santos randomly attacks the singer. BY EVE BATEY

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