What can Taylor Swift tell us about authors' rights?
Scholarly Communication Librarian, Melissa Cantrell
How did pop-megastar Taylor Swift become a champion for authors' rights? Melissa Cantrell, scholarly communication librarian at the University Libraries, explains in our summer edition of “Unlocking Scholarly Publishing.”
It all comes down to a dispute over the master recordings of her first six albums.
Swift didn’t own her master recordings. What happened?
When musical artists sign onto a record label, it typically covers upfront costs like recording and marketing in exchange for ownership of the masters, through which it receives a percentage of the royalties. While Swift retained copyright over the songs themselves, the recordings are covered under a separate layer of copyright and contract law.
How did Swift bring attention to the rights of artists and authors?
When Swift’s record label was sold, all of her master recordings were sold without giving her the opportunity to buy back her own work. She protested this by re-recording the albums and distributing them as “Taylor’s Versions.” She now had control over her own work as both author and owner of these new re-recordings.
While most artists lack the resources and influence to make re-recordings successful, Swift used her star power and storytelling to drive demand for the new versions and diminish interest in the original master recordings. This caused the originals to have less value to the record label. And on May 30, 2025, Swift announced that she was able to successfully negotiate for ownership of her master recordings.
It is unlikely Swift’s ordeal will drastically change the recording industry or the fate of most artists’ master recordings. However, it raises important questions about how art is monetized and highlights the difficult position musicians often face when trying to share their work with the world.
Taylor Swift
By iHeartRadioCA, CC BY 3.0
Wikimedia Commons
What does Swift’s story have to do with scholarly publishing?
Authors of scholarly research often forfeit copyright over their work when publishing journal articles and other research outputs, much like Swift and most other recording artists. This not only limits how authors can share their own work in classrooms and future research—it also forces universities to pay again for access to knowledge they helped create. Meanwhile, the public is left behind paywalls, denied access to research that could drive innovation, inform policy and improve lives.
By calling attention to the complex and often unjust systems which separate artists from their creations, Swift represents resilience and empowerment to authors everywhere.
I don’t want to end up in Swift’s situation, what can I do?
- Publish your work Open Access (OA), which generally allows for author retention of copyright.
- Publishing in a venue covered by one of our established agreements can fully cover or reduce costs which may be associated with OA.
- If your journal is not currently covered under an agreement but is fully OA, we can offset costs through our general Open Access Fund.
- You can apply for up to $15K to make your monograph OA through our Open Monograph Fund.
- You can also make a variety of research outputs, including articles and data, publicly accessible via CU Scholar, our institutional repository. This can expand the reach of your work and complies with grant requirements for public access.
Have a suggestion for OA support or an agreement with a publisher you’d like to see? We’d like to hear from you!