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Taylor Swift has successfully implemented a strategy of recreating and releasing exact copies of old albums to maintain ownership of her songs
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- Title
- Opinion: Why Taylor Swift just accomplished what no other musician has | CNN
- Published
- Jul 25 2023
Disclaimer: I'm a Taylor Swift fan. (not a Swiftie though imo)
I think "recreating and releasing exact copies" is slightly misleading. She does add more songs "from the vault," and honestly, I like a lot of the newer versions better because it's clear she's gotten better at sound mixing and producing over the years. I think the new version of Red is like 4 different vinyls with 30 tracks. I kinda find it weird that the article doesn't mention that at all.
It's also kinda a genius ruthless business decision if you look at it. She despises who her masters have been sold to and so she's released them again, giving herself total control of the "better" versions of her masters, while simultaneously making those old masters worthless.
Edit: sorry, I skimmed it too fast and it does actually mention the unreleased songs, my bad!
Legally I'm kinda in awe of this -- it's an absolutely phenomenal business decision on her part and it's incredibly effective at screwing over the people who own her old masters. I'm sure she has smart people advising her because damn, that's some nice legal finagling.
Is she actually doing the mixing and mastering herself?
No. But she's credited as a producer, which is a vague term. I suspect she provides creative input to the engineers, and perhaps OKs the final version
yeah, I'd think she'd have final approval for sure.
I really hope this goes well for Taylor Swift, and I am certainly no lawyer, but this kind of feels legally sketchy to me. Taylor Swift owning the rights to the compositions pretty unambiguously means she is free to record her own versions of the songs, license them to other people under any terms she likes, and make money off of them without sharing. But, if it’s true what the article says that several of the albums in question are “deliberately engineered to sound as much like the original versions as possible”, from my understanding of copyright law, this is pretty much just blatantly admitting that her production team is attempting to produce a derivative work of the actual masters themselves which Taylor Swift has no legal right to do. I think it’s strange how I don’t really find anyone discussing this aspect given how we’ve literally seen musicians successfully sued for simply emulating a “feeling” of a previous copyrighted work in an otherwise completely original composition. Am I just missing something?
My understanding (and backed by the article) is that Swift holds the copywrite. What is held by the label is the physical recording and the ability to sell copies of that physical recording.
Pretty easy to prove in court that Swift's version is not the same physical recording as the one the labels own.
There are multiple copyrights involved with a recorded song. There is the copyright to the composition (the song rendered as sheet music, essentially) and there is the copyright to the recording itself. Every recording of a composition has its own distinct copyright associated with it. Taylor Swift owns the copyrights to the compositions, but her former label owns the copyrights to the actual recordings themselves as they were originally released. It would be a completely different situation if she just recorded new versions of the songs without using the originals as a reference. But the article says that they essentially tried to make an extremely high quality counterfeit of the original recordings (my language), again, which she does not own the copyrights to, and I don’t see how having the rights to the compositions would protect you.
I think the only reasonable assumption anyone here without a law degree nor hundreds of hours of legal studies on similar cases can make is that Taylor Swift's legal team has done a lot more legwork on this matter than most other people are even capable of and have found (and now demonstrated) that this is legally possible.
She's been on this initiative for years now without a single legal challenge in a pretty litigious industry.
Yes I am sure that her lawyers are competent and it’s true that she hasn’t been sued, but it doesn’t really answer any of my questions. I said “Am I just missing something?” And I feel like you and the other person are essentially just saying “yeah, probably, but I don’t know I’m not a lawyer either” in a lot of words without offering any elaboration on it, or even why you personally think it might be fine other than simply trusting the competency of her legal team.
I did not attempt to answer your question because I am not a lawyer. I simply stated what a reasonable assumption would be for lay people like us. We do not know better than the legal teams involved, and they have not divulged their findings. And this includes the article writer, they are also not a lawyer and will not be using legally accurate terminology in their piece, especially since this is an op-ed article and not a journalistic one. Their work will naturally be more imprecise than a legal argument would call for, and it should not be held to the word to base a legal challenge around.
You're questioning something that has been reviewed by multiple high-powered legal teams in a litigious industry. Many people have already tried to give you an answer and you came back with so many "buts" questioning them. To what end? Do you really think you've found some kind of legal avenue that multiple legal teams missed? Do you want a lawyer to come out of the woodwork and provide a legal dissertation for free? We are all just random people on the internet who don't have the answers, only the facts of the greater situation as we have seen them unfold.
Who are we to not just question what is legal here, but then to insist that there must be something that isn't legal? Just because we can level a charge doesn't mean it's valid one. The facts at hand should presuppose that what is happening here is legal, not that there must be something illegal. I don't see what non-experts debating something purely by way of assumptions is going to accomplish when the experts have already settled on the matter.
Because Swift has the main songwriting credits, she owns the lyrics and melodies - basically the substantive parts of the music itself and the subsequent publishing rights. They are the precursors to recording. The actual recordings themselves are governed by the master rights. Swift (and the other credited songwriters) have the say over whether lyrics are reproduced, and the label has say over whether a commercial can use a snippet of her original albums.
Because the limitation on re-recording the albums expired in 2020, she was able to produce new versions of her music that are essentially note-for-note the same as she owns the notes. She's not producing a derivative work of the original albums. Instead, it's a derivative work of the composition. So, both recordings are derivatives of the composition, but her new recording is not a derivative of the first recording.
The US copyright office makes this clear. See this document.
The people who own the masters don't own any of the individual components that go into the recording -- they don't own the composition (as you acknowledge) but they also don't own instrumentation or the way it's mixed in isolation from other elements (these things are likely not copyrightable on their own, only as elements of a larger work). They own the use of that exact recording and copies thereof, and Taylor is not copying any part of the original recording. A very similar recording is not the same thing, even if it's deliberately similar.
Think of it this way -- I could record a cover of one of Taylor Swift's songs. I could try to sound as similar to Taylor as possible, use the instrumentation and mixing that's as similar to the recording as possible. If I did this without licensing the song in the appropriate way, I would obviously be violating the copyright on the composition. But unless I sampled the original recording, I'm obviously not violating the copyright on the masters, since I never used them in my recording. There's nothing to stop Taylor from doing the same thing, since she owns the copyright on the composition.
Let's use a different example to illustrate the difference between copyright of a piece of music and copyright of a recording.
The only difference in Taylor Swift's case is that she's both person A and person C.
This is a simple legal matter. Consider everyone who's recorded like a super famous classical piece of music, or Happy Birthday: only those with the writing rights can be infringed, not others who've licensed recordings. They only have legal standing if I copy/duplicate their version.
(remixes, sampling etc. are much more complicated than this case in terms of rights)
Edit: Parenthetical sentence added
Well written sheet music will have tons of these details, but it’s hardly “all sheet music”, and I’ve never seen an actual piece of sheet music that actually comes anywhere close to covering all the aspects of producing a recorded track. Like I’ve never seen sheet music that told you very specific details like how to set up your equalizers, what pedals or amps to use, what kind of room to record the song in, what kind of material the walls should be made of, how to set up your synthesizers. And any sheet music that did include that level of detail would not be well received as it would basically read like a screenplay with way too much scene direction.
The scenario you present also is characteristically different from the real life situation. The article literally says that they deliberately engineered at least some of the new recordings to sound as close to the original as possible. Not that by simple virtue of the fact that both recordings stayed true to the sheet music they have significant similarity. If person C recorded their version like normal but then went and listened to person B’s recording and literally adjusted there’s to the point where the casual listener could literally no longer distinguish between the two versions, I’d say it’s a pretty blatant copyright violation by person C against person B, as it’s no longer just derivative of the sheet music alone.
No I agree that the sheet music doesn't give specific technical details, but when it says "melancholy" there are only a certain amount of ways of getting there with the instruments you've got at your disposal.
Again, I can copy someone else's guitar fingering, their entire solo, when a saxophone player breathes or whatever else I want without crediting them. A performer (or the person with the rights to a performer's performance) doesn't have copyright to stop others performing the work in similar/identical ways.
Many modern compositions have sheet music derived from demos, and so many of the other features you mention come from that source.
There is absolutely nothing that says I can't try to emulate Johnny Cash's version of "Hurt" and try do sound as similar to that recording as possible.
When Swift never sold exclusive rights, and never limited herself to that specific recording, she's definitely free both as a composer and a musician to try to sound exactly how she wans, whether that's super close to others or not.
As long as she doesn't use the same snare drum (unless she has the rights to that sample), she sure can build a snare sound and make it sound just as close as she wants.
All I can say is that in my experience with law, the actual legal standard is frequently not what you would expect and often is just fucked up.
I'm typically not a big country or pop music fan in general, so Taylor Swift had never been on my radar as someone who I would be interested in listening to, but I absolutely love and respect this move to stick it to her old label so much that I gave some of her newer albums a try (Folklore and Evermore), and glad I did because I enjoy them quite a bit. I'm not going to become a Swiftie any time soon but she's now got a place in my music library which I never would have predicted.