Why does (Taylor's Version) exist?

To answer this question, we go back to 2018, when Taylor signed with Universal. Previously, she was under contract with Big Machine Records, the label with which she recorded her first six albums: Taylor Swift (2006), Fearless (2008), Speak Now (2010), Red (2012), 1989 (2014) and Reputation (2017). The artist had assigned to Big Machine Records the rights to these recordings and signed a clause that did not allow her to re-record her songs until November 2020. This label was bought by Ithaca Holding, a company owned by Scooter Braun, a producer and businessman with whom Taylor had previously worked and whom she had said she had suffered bullying. And it was here where the problems began, as Taylor explained in a letter on her Tumblr account.

By buying the label, Scooter Braun acquired all the rights to Taylor's catalog and did not allow her to own her own music, the same music that had made her one of the world's leading artists. Trying to reach a solution to recover all the rights to these songs, in 2019 she decided to record all this material again in order to be the owner of these new re-recorded albums and, to avoid confusion, she released them with their original title accompanied by "(Taylor's Version)". In this way, she would receive the total royalties generated by these songs with the new versions. This is what she did from 2020, starting with her 2008 album Fearless, which was re-released as Fearless (Taylor's Version) in April 2021. Since then she has also re-recorded her 2012 album Red, Speak Now and her last release, 1989 (Taylor's Version).

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