Taylor Swift is successfully ‘shaking off’ her old record label with her new re-records

COLLEGE PARK, Md. — Thirteen years. This is how long Bridget Walsh, a self-proclaimed Swiftie, has been a fan of Taylor Swift.

Walsh, a senior marketing and information systems student at the University of Maryland, can recall listening and dancing to Swift’s music since as far back as 2010 when Swift released the original version of her album Speak Now.

“I really started listening to her in 2010, so I would have been around 8 years old,” Walsh said.

This past summer, Swift released a re-recording of that album, entitled Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), which includes an additional six new songs, called the vault tracks. These vault tracks are songs written for the original album that were ultimately left off of it.

Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) marks the third album that Swift has re-released in her journey to re-record all of her first six albums.

The decision to re-record her albums is an attempt to have ownership over her songs and devalue her original work following the announcement in 2019 that the original masters rights to her songs were sold when Big Machine Label Group, which includes Swift’s old record label, Big Machine Records, was bought by Scooter Braun’s company Ithaca Holdings for around $300 million.

Fans like Walsh will have the opportunity to support Swift by buying and listening to ‘Taylor’s version’ of these albums.

“From a fan standpoint, I think it’s cool to hear an artist that you grew up listening to revisit key moments from their career and release more music from those eras,” Walsh said of the re-recording process. “From a business standpoint, it’s a move that allows her ownership of her new masters, which is great.”

Ultimately, the success of the re-records will be determined by the fans’ willingness to engage with the new content and to listen to it over the old albums.

“I definitely think it’s important to try my best to listen to the new songs, especially because Taylor owns them and has specifically said that this ownership is important to her,” Walsh said.

So, how successful have the efforts been so far?

Fearless

The first album that Swift re-recorded was Fearless. Fearless (Taylor’s Version) was released in April of 2021.

“This process has been more fulfilling and emotional than I could’ve imagined and has made me even more determined to re-record all of my music. I hope you’ll like this first outing as much as I liked traveling back in time to recreate it,” Swift wrote in a statement on her Instagram story ahead of the album’s first single, “Love Story (Taylor’s Version)”.

The album saw 1 million album sales with streaming equivalents in 2021, according to data from Luminate, a company that collects music and entertainment industry data.

A streaming equivalent album is a Billboard metric that counts every 1,250 premium streams and every 3,750 free streams as an album unit.

Swift made it clear with this release that she was trying to stay as true to the old record as possible in both sound and production.

“I can normally tell the difference between the albums just because her voice sounds better, it’s older, it’s more mature, her voice has definitely increased its capacity,” Walsh said of the way she differentiates between the recordings.

Red

In November of 2021, Swift released Red (Taylor’s Version) which surpassed the original version with 1.2 million album sales with streaming equivalent units before the end of the year, according to Luminate.

Both Fearless (Taylor’s Version) and Red (Taylor’s Version) have had more album sales with streaming equivalent units than their original counterparts in the years since their respective releases.

Red (Taylor’s version) is the most successful album to date out of all the re-records and original albums since 2018. The album has acquired over 3 million album sales and streaming equivalent units since its release, according to data from Luminate.

Speak Now and 1989

Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) came out in July of this year and is on track to pass its original counterpart by the end of the year, according to data from Luminate.

1989 (Taylor’s Version), which was released on October 27, has not been out long enough to have sufficient data for proper comparison.

However, the first week of sales for 1989 (Taylor’s Version) outsold the first week of the original album by about 72,000 copies, according to Billboard. This was the first Taylor’s Version to outsell its original counterpart in sales within the first week.

The vault track from 1989 (Taylor’s Version), “Is It Over Now? (Taylor’s Version) (From The Vault)” held the number one spot atop the Billboard chart for the week of November 11th.

Something that cannot be numerically measured is the impact that listening to old favorite songs in a new way has had on Swift’s fans, according to Walsh.

“Being a fan for such a long time and having Taylor revisit these old albums has made them come back into my life all over again,” Walsh said. “What an album meant to me at age ten has a whole different meaning now in my twenties.”