Taylor Swift’s Fight for Property Rights

“It was the night things changed.”

On April 9, all of Taylor Swift’s social media accounts posted this message, as a way of announcing the re-release of her 2008 album, Fearless. For Swift and her fans alike, this declaration was about so much more than one album; it stood for Swift taking ownership over her work, changing the course of her life and her music.

The re-release was generated by a convoluted public controversy that started in 2019 when Ithaca Holdings, a company run by record executive Scooter Braun, acquired Big Machine Label Group, the record company that produced Taylor Swift’s first six albums. Big Machine Records owned the “masters” for each album, meaning that the company reserved the rights to negotiate the use of the songs and profited from those royalties. In turn, Braun’s purchase gave him control over Swift’s masters.

According to Swift, she had previously “asked, pleaded for a chance to own my own work,” but was denied the opportunity to buy back her masters and thereby own her songs. Swift also claimed that she had been victim to Braun’s “incessant, manipulative bullying” for years, and therefore feared that Braun would maliciously abuse her life’s work. Swift asserted that both Big Machine Records and Ithaca Holdings were “controlling a woman who didn’t want to be associated with them” by keeping her masters and giving them to a man who had harassed her.

Rather than accept defeat, Swift chose to re-record her albums and will maintain rights to the new recordings. As such, any entity that wants to use her new recordings can contract directly with Swift, and she will receive those royalties. For example, if a company wants to use “Love Story” in an ad, they can reach out to Swift to use her newly recorded version, rather than buying the old recording of the song from Big Machine Records.

Swift’s ordeal demonstrates the pernicious double standards of corporate property rights. While theoretically one of the major tenets of the American legal system is the protection of personal property, the system fails to uphold these rights when a young woman is the subject of such a claim. Contracts ought to defend individual property claims even as they allow for the transfer of property, but we ignore those property rights when it’s inconvenient, especially when young women enter into unjust contracts as Swift did.

Swift’s music should have been considered her property; the songs in her first six albums were extensions of her creative interpretations of the personal experiences of heartbreak, love, and friendship, and therefore she should not have lost all access to that property for her entire life. As Swift clearly articulated, “artists should own their own work for so many reasons, but the most screamingly obvious one is that the artist is the only one who really *knows* that body of work.” Instead of protecting Swift’s right to property in the form of ownership of her masters, our legal system allowed her — at 15 years old — to sign a contract that stripped her of ownership of her ideas and creative work without allowing her to buy them back.

Swift’s experience echoes how women have historically been deprived of property rights. Under the law of coverture, women could not own property. Instead, their fathers and husbands owned the property and could use and profit from that property however they pleased. Big Machine Records is doing the same thing in claiming and profiting from Swift’s records. As legal scholar Mallory Reader notes, “While property rights in themselves are important indicators of equality, the right of women to own and control property empowers women in other ways.” Ownership and control of property provide women with security and agency and are therefore critical feminist issues.

Swift is now working outside of the legal system to regain ownership of her music. Rather than negotiating the contract and trying to buy back the initial masters, Swift leveraged her fan base to reclaim her work. Taking to social media, she explained the situation and inspired her fans to boycott the Big Machine Records versions of the songs. Fan accounts have since posted infographics informing others about how to block the old versions of songs on streaming services, and encouraging listeners to instead prioritize the new “Taylor’s Version” of the songs.

In this manner, social media has allowed Swift to avoid the tricky legal system and instead reclaim the property where it matters most — in the hearts, minds, and “views” of her fan base. If her fans follow through, she will have devalued the Big Machine Records versions of the songs and reasserted her right to the property of her original albums.