Here’s a great article that covers it quite well:
Re-Recording Your Old Songs: How Taylor Swift is “Shaking Off” Her Old Record Company
this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Can I just take a moment to appreciate how nuts this whole thing is?! Great that she's able to get back and record her musics once more!
So when it comes to copyright music can actually be divided into two things: the song itself (the lyrics and melodies) and the performance of a song (the recording). I don't know the entire situation but I'm guessing Taylor Swift owns the rights of the songs themselves, but not the rights to the recordings of the songs that were made, so she's in her right to make her own recordings of the songs and then she would have full ownership of those. (Sidenote: I study composing for media and though copyright is part of my study, I'm not an expert)
In not a lawyer, but I think the recordings are what is owned by the label. As long as she wrote the song, she can re-record and release the new recordings.
Best TL;DR yet!
A finer detail is that Swift was contractually prohibited from new recordings for two years after original contract ended — that time has now passed.
I've done a bit of this for TV/film stuff, and yeah there's basically two copyrights on a piece of music - there's the rights to the song in general, and the performance rights. That's why you've got to be careful with public domain recordings and check the date of the performance - if you use a song that's old enough to be public domain but a more recent recording of it that isn't, you can be in trouble.
I'm pretty sure that's also why so many trailers have weird covers of famous songs on them (usually a woman doing a slow acoustic version of a rock song for some reason) - that way they can pay for the song rights, and get some aspiring singer to record it for next to nothing so they don't have to also pay the performance rights for it.
Others have answered but I thought I’d throw in a video about the subject for audio-visual learners. Here’s the LegalEagle video on the subject.
Thank you! I think I understand it now. Legal eagle is the shit. I didn't even think to check his channel about this.
He's so damn good at explaining leagalnese.
He should be a lawyer or something.
Vanilla Ice is actually why "Soundalikes" are legal. Thats right, if it wasn't for Ice Ice Baby we might not be able to freely make recordings that sound similar to other songs. Shit, the whole EDM industry might have never happened. Of course, people were doing this in hip-hop since the dawn of time. But Ice Ice Baby is what gave it legal precedent.
Care to provide any more backstory on this? That's absolutely fascinating haha, never would've thought that from Ice Ice Baby
I am not looking this up. It came up during a study at a trade achool like 10 years ago. But IIRC he got sued for it sounding like Under Pressure and he had to prove he remade the sound and didn't rip it from the recording directly. This is important becsuse you get to dip out on royalties.
God thats a depressing question. How can artist play music they created.
Lol yeah I hate it too. I just know how cut throat the business is. Love that she took back her own music though. Hope this is more of a trend with other artist out there. Fuck these greedy ass music labels
Music copyright has a notion of "compulsory licensing"; as long as the original creator is credited and the copyright holder paid a statutory fee, anyone can record & publish covers of any published piece of music.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_license
https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ73.pdf
So she has to pay Scooter Bruan to re record her songs?
Scooter Bruan only owns the copyright to the recordings; Taylor owns the copyright to her songs. So, Taylor just has to pay herself.
I’m curious as to what the fan response is. Artists recording newer versions of their songs is not often received well, if for no reason other than that fans tend to still prefer the originals.
According to the article @moon_crush linked, she broke a popularity record previously held by The Beatles with them.
Well, what's nice about it is that the old versions aren't going anywhere. If you prefer the old one, great! You can listen to the old one. And if these new ones get played on the radio more due to them being new, well she gets that money now rather than some guy who didn't write the song just because he had money when she needed it.
Personally, I prefer the old versions, especially for her older songs. I think she wasn't quite yet so jaded, and she believed in the love fantasies she was singing about. I'm specifically think of the song Love Story. She doesn't sound as excited in the rerecording of that one, and I can obviously only speculate that it is because she just doesn't believe in that fantasy anymore due to all of her life experiences.
I'm very curious to hear the rerecording Ours, because you can actually hear her smiling in some lines with the way she pronounces the words in the original. I'm skeptical that she can recapture the magic of what I consider one of her best performances from her early career.
From reading between the lines of what Taylor has said, it seems like the new ones get played because IHeartRadio would prefer to keep Taylor happy than some skeevy music producer. Why would a major radio or streaming service want to alienate one of the most popular artists to save some money on streaming rights?
Also, a lot of Taylor's fans are ride or die. I could see them actively choosing their streaming services or radio stations based on what version gets played by default.
She may feel more settled with Alonso?
Her fans are overwhelmingly supportive of her rereleases. Her former manager or whatever he was, made $250m profit from buying and then selling the master rights against her knowledge/wishes. It was a completely legal but shitty move and Taylor made the dispute very public. It wasn’t just her fans who supported her re-recording and rereleasing her albums though, a huge number of artists, music industry people, journalists and even politicians supported her.
Everyone loves the new versions. The new 10 minute version of all too well is amazing. She plays it at her eras concert every night and everyone knows the lyrics by heart
Were those re-recordings? I thought they were just longer edits.
Rerecording and cut verses. Since she owns the sheet and not the recording she had to remake the whole thing.
All of the "Taylor's Version" albums and songs are rerecorded.
I guess it may depend on the rights of scooter. He may only have rights to the recordings themselves and not the lyrics.
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