📑 Look What They Made Her Do: Taylor Swift To Re-Record Her Catalog
For artists, master recordings — the original recordings of musicians’ work — are vital musically, historically and financially. In most situations, labels own those masters. But many musicians, both prominent and independent ones, have tried to hang on to their masters. As Prince famously told Rolling Stone back in 1996, “If you don’t own your masters, your master owns you.”
This is such an intriguing state of affairs, what is involved in ‘re-recording’ a record? Are there limits to what can be reproduced? What does this all say about the ‘masters’?