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Book about big machine records11/20/2023 The label also owns the imprints Valory Music Co. Swift also announced that she would re-record her old albums to fully gain ownership of them. Braun later sold the masters to Shamrock Holdings (another holding company owned by the Disney family). Controversy ensued when it turned out Braun had obtained the masters of Taylor Swift's first six albums (which Swift had been trying to buy for years, only to be repeatedly snubbed), and was set to profit off them. In 2019, Big Machine was acquired by Ithaca Holdings, a holding company owned by talent manager Scooter Braun, whose clients notably include Ariana Grande, Demi Lovato, and Justin Bieber, among others. Other acts on the label have come and gone over the years, and it has remained one of the stronger independent players in the country music field. Also successful in the long term is Florida Georgia Line, who records for the BMLG (formerly Republic Nashville) division. Swift remained signed to Big Machine until 2018, and has remained one of the label's most successful artist. But it was a young teenager from Pennsylvania named Taylor Swift who would send the label to fame. The label's first major hit came in 2006 when they picked up Texas country singer Jack Ingram, who promptly got a #1 country hit with "Wherever You Are". If Braun were to sell today, at multiples of 22x to 25x, he’d be looking at a $1 billion valuation for a company he and backers Carlyle Group spent $300 million to buy.Big Machine Records is an American independent record label founded in 2005 by Nashville, Tennessee businessman Scott Borchetta, who had previously worked for MCA Nashville and DreamWorks Records Nashville. ![]() Right now, rights to master recording are seen as incredibly valuable one-of-a-kind works of art, not unlike that of a famous painter. On the other hand, that’s a question of the future. Any such confusion may ultimately have an adverse effect on perception of the worth of the Big Machine catalog, potentially devaluing the assets. Then again, others may prefer the original. To be sure, Swift has made her fans more than aware of her feelings about Braun’s acquisition of her masters, and it’s likely that a large percentage of them will follow her to whichever versions of her songs she asks them to. But Soriano says it’s “an unusual provision” for a label to make seeing as interest in the catalogs often spurs consumption of both the original and new versions. However, some contracts do have what is called an original production or “sound alike” clause, which prohibits a newly recorded version from being too similar to the original - if that’s the case with her contract, a Swift-sung reggaeton version of “Mean” or a heavy metal take on “Love Story” could have moved closer to reality. “Standard language is two years after the end of the term or five years after the release of the recording in question.” Once an artist’s deal with their label expires, that artist has “a contractural right to record for a new label and for to make money off those recordings,” she tells Variety. Laurie Soriano, a top music industry attorney and partner in the firm King, Holmes, Paterno & Soriano, who has no involvement in the Swift contract, says she doesn’t see any reason why Swift couldn’t move ahead with new versions of her songs and points to the practice by legacy artists to do the same. This source suggests that any album more than five years old is fair game. ![]() On the flip side, an insider tells Variety that Swift believes she can re-record her classics and that a smart lawyer - Swift’s is Donald Passman, one of the top attorneys in the industry and the man who literally wrote the book on the music industry - would not allow a severe re-record restriction in their artist’s contract. For example, she may not have access to the album’s original artwork or even the names of the songs. On one side, the assertion that Swift would be unable to re-record songs from her catalog until five years from 2018, when her deal with Big Machine officially expired, and even then the process would be prohibitively complicated. Without direct knowledge of Swift’s contract, unnamed sources are batting around both sides of the coin. Record companies quickly got wise to the practice and wrote provisions into their standard contracts setting a time period - typically two years after an album’s terms expire or five years after the release of the recording - before those same songs, which include live versions, could be released. ![]() Prince and Def Leppard are two artists who successfully went that route in the past when they felt they were being unfairly compensated by their original labels, but their contracts dated back to the 1970s.
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