Last year, ahead of the 2019 American Music Awards, Taylor Swift dominated the headlines when she called out Scooter Braun and Scott Borchetta for not signing off on her performing her own music at the event while receiving the Artist of the Decade award. Everything worked out for her in the end and she made a pointed statement about the battle over her master recordings in her outfits and with her performance and a year later, we now know that she still hasn’t been able to buy back her own work, as she recently shared that she’s been f-cked over once again. She also shared, however, that she’s having a great time re-recording her songs. 

 

Yesterday, ahead of the 2020 American Music Awards, Taylor posted this on social media: 

By now, it’s not just her fans who know but basically everyone – if Taylor says nothing’s going on, it means something is definitely going on. So people started theorising whether or not she’d make a surprise appearance at the show last night. She did not. But she did send a message. And the message was as good as her being there in person for what she revealed. 

 

“The reason I’m not there tonight is because I’m actually re-recording all of my old music … in the studio where, um, where we originally recorded it…”

That’s a significant piece of information. If she’s at the same studio where the music was recorded initially, it suggests that she’s going for the exact same sound to completely replace the old masters, rendering them effectively useless. Right? 

 

Taylor doesn’t do things facetiously, she knows exactly what she’s saying and how exactly it’ll be interpreted. And this is exactly the message she was sending last night. But as strategic as she is, her big gift is her creativity…

So I wonder, in addition to doing the songs exactly the same as she did the first time, will she also package these “new originals” with different versions. For example, for the 1989 album, do we get every single song as she sang them the first time, arranged in the same way, sounding exactly the same…and bonus versions of the track? For example, “Style”, my favourite Taylor Swift song of all time, would be delivered as we know it, but she could also throw in an acoustic version or, I dunno, an EDM version for kicks, so the consumer still gets something fresh from the purchase? 

Taylor loves setting records. Imagine the flex of breaking sales records by selling an album of songs that are several years old? This is what she’s aiming for, isn’t it?