New contracts postpone artist re-recordings for up to 10 years.
In 2019, Taylor Swift announced that he would re-record all the albums he released with Big Machine Records, With a risky approach, Taylor’s Version became successful albums that changed the paradigm for artists. Now, the biggest labels are looking at how to modify the terms in their contracts to “protect” themselves from this.
It was announced that the most representative companies in the music industry found how to protect themselves from the imminent success of re-recordings. This phenomenon is nothing new, artists like FTA, Neil Young and, more recently, *N SYNC have re-released their songs to recover their masters from old record labels. Now, companies amend their contracts to make a rerecording legal up to 15 years after a contract term.
This has generated controversy for limiting intellectual property rights, so it is believed that artists will seek music licensing contracts, that is, for a record label to only receive benefits for its distribution.
When Taylor Swift announced the re-recordings he was looking to recover his music, something that marked a milestone in the industry, now he has recovered four albums, such as the most recent 1989 (Taylor’s Version). Could this be the beginning of a total change in how we consume music?
