Taylor Swift shared that she sent her mother and brother to negotiate the purchase of her master recordings from Shamrock Capital, the private equity firm that later acquired them after they were first sold by Big Machine Records.
After wrapping the Eras Tour, Taylor decided to try once again to reclaim ownership of her music.
"What I was looking to do was I wanted to buy my music outright. I [didn't] want to be in a partnership. I [didn't] want to own 30% of it. I want it. I want to own all of it. But it was a long shot to think that they would do that, that they would sell that, that asset to me," Taylor explained. "It’s a huge decision for them to make, to sell that to anyone, including me."
Rather than approaching the negotiation through traditional business channels, Taylor chose to lead with "heart first."
"I decided that, rather than this be like a business conversation. I'm in the business of human emotion. I would so much rather lead heart first in something like this," she explained. "For me, this is not, 'Oh, I want to own this asset because of its returns, because of the dividends that I will receive over the years.' I want it because this is my hand-written diary entries from my whole life. These are the songs I wrote about every phase of my life. This is my photography, my music videos, most of which I funded. My artwork, everything that I've ever done is in this catalog.”
Instead of sending lawyers or management, Taylor asked her mother, Andrea Swift and brother, Austin Swift, to meet with Shamrock Capital. "I sent my mom and my brother, who I work with, to L.A.... They sat down with Shamrock Capital, and they told them what this meant for me. They told them the whole story of all the times we’ve tried to buy it, all the times it’s fallen through, all the times we had gotten plans together and figured out something we thought was going to work and it didn’t at the last minute."
“And so, my mom calls me afterwards, she’s like, 'Look, they were wonderful. They heard us out. We have no idea which way they’re going to go with this.' And so I was like, 'I get it. I get it.' I haven't gotten my hopes up about this in a decade."
Months later, Taylor finally received the life-changing news. "It was a couple months after the Super Bowl, we're in Kansas City and I got a call from my mom and she's like... 'You got your music...' And I just like very dramatically hit the floor for real. I was bawling my eyes out, just weeping."
Taylor remarked that she is truly grateful to finally be owning her music. "I think about this every day now, but instead of it being like an intrusive thought that hurts me, it's I can't believe this happened. Like, how lucky am I? How grateful am I?"