As Taylor Swift sang on the 10th track from her 2010 album Speak Now: “There is nothing I do better than revenge.”
And judging by the initial sales for the re-recorded, newly released version of Love Story, she wasn’t lying.
The track — which is the first step of Swift’s masterplan to re-release all six of the albums she released with the Big Machine record label — dropped on Friday (February 12) and racked up an impressive 10,000 downloads within 24 hours. By comparison, the original recording of Love Story only shifted 200 digital copies.
That said, Swift still has some way to go in order to overtake the initial recording’s all-time figures, which currently stand at around 6.13m downloads over the past 12 years. But other early signs are promising — at the time of writing, the new version had more than 11.5m Spotify streams, with a further 10m views on YouTube.
These early successes will be viewed by many as vindication of Swift’s move to take back control over her back catalogue, which has been the subject of fierce controversy. In 2019, Scooter Braun bought Big Machine and, along with it, a vast chunk of Swift’s masters — in other words, he owned the actual recordings of music released by Swift while signed to the label. This went against the wishes of Swift, who had been trying to buy her masters for some years prior.
Then, in October 2020, Braun sold the masters to private equity firm Shamrock Holdings in a deal believed to be worth around $300m. But crucially, just a month or so after this, a clause expired in Swift’s original Big Machine contract, which meant she was now allowed to re-record and re-release all of her music, creating new masters and, effectively, taking back ownership of her own work.
The first newly recorded batch of Swift’s music looks set to arrive on April 9, and will be a remake of her 2008 album Fearless, with six previously unheard tracks from the era also included.
