Swift herself first revealed the new recording deadline for her first five LPS — 2006’s Taylor Swift through 2014’s 1989 — back in August 2019 following her highly public feud with Scooter Braun and Scott Borchetta over control of her masters. (In July 2019, Braun bought Swift’s former label, Big Machine Records, in a landmark $300 million deal through his company Ithaca Holdings, effectively giving him ownership of the star’s entire pre-Lover catalog of work. At the time, Swift called the move her “worst case scenario.”)
“Yeah, that’s true and it’s something that I’m very excited about doing because my contract says that starting November 2020, so next year, I can record albums one through five all over again,” she told Good Morning America‘s Robin Roberts at the time. “I’m very excited about it. I just think that artists deserve to own their own work. I just feel very passionately about that.”
Meanwhile, Swift’s latest album — 2020’s Folklore — has spent a record eight nonconsecutive weeks atop the Billboard 200 this year, becoming the only album to sell more than one million copies in 2020. (For those keeping score at home, the last major release to achieve the million-unit mark also happens to be her 2019 LP, Lover.)
Check out some of the best #TaylorIsFree fan reactions below.
