re-recordings
Upon its Oct. 27 release, Taylor Swift’s 1989 (Taylor’s Version) quickly eroded both sales and streams of the original 2014 version released by Big Machine Records.
In the week Swift released her album of 1989 re-recordings, the original 1989 had 21,000 album equivalent units (AEUs) — down 43.6% from the previous week and down 36.9% from the trailing 12-week average, according to Billboard analysis of Luminate data for the United States. That was a deeper first-week decline than the previous two times Swift released re-recordings. The original Red lost 38% of its AEUs — a metric that combines physical and digital album sales, track sales and streams — the week Red (Taylor’s Version) was released in November 2021. The original Speak Now dropped 40% the week that Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) came out this past July.
On-demand audio streams for the original 1989 declined 56.4% while track sales — a smaller component of 1989’s total consumption — fell 67.8%. Video streams declined 56.4% and programmed streams (from non-interactive internet radio services such as Pandora) dropped 23.6%. At the same time, 1989 (Taylor’s Version) amassed over 375.49 million on-demand streams — compared with just 27.8 million total on-demand streams for the original over the same period.
The Taylor’s Version series of re-recordings stemmed from Swift’s outrage that her catalog had been acquired by Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings in 2019. News that Braun took ownership of her catalog brought her back to “the incessant, manipulative bullying I’ve received at [Braun’s] hands for years,” she wrote at the time. “Now Scooter has stripped me of my life’s work, that I wasn’t given an opportunity to buy,” she continued. By the end of that year, Swift was talking about recording new versions so her music “could live on,” she told Billboard in a December 2019 interview. “I do want it to be in movies, I do want it to be in commercials. But I only want that if I own it.”
Swift released her first album of re-recordings, for the 2008 album Fearless, in April 2021, and licensed the lead-off single, “Love Story,” to a Match.com television ad. The track debuted at No. 1 on the Hot Country Songs chart and No. 11 on the Hot 100 in February 2021. Fearless (Taylor’s Version) debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart with 291,000 AEUs.
With each new Taylor’s Version, Swift changes the playbook on how an artist can repackage previously released material for a growing legion of diehard fans. While it’s remarkable that Swift’s album releases have become pop culture moments unto themselves, each new wave of re-recordings carries large business and financial implications, too. If 1989 (Taylor’s Version) performs like its predecessors, the re-recordings will crowd out the original version and further erode the value of the Big Machine original catalog that Shamrock Holdings paid a reported $300 million to acquire in 2020.
Surprisingly, while Swift collectors scooped up 1.36 million units of the 1989 (Taylor’s Version) album — it has five versions on vinyl, eight versions on CD and two versions on cassette — consumers still purchased about 1,000 units of the 1989 album in physical or digital formats during the same period.
Expect more of the same in the coming weeks. If 1989 (Taylor’s Version) follows the trends of the two most recent Taylor’s Version albums that came before it, the original 1989 will lose close to half or more than half of its weekly AEUs. Average weekly consumption of the original Red dropped 40% in the 12 weeks following the release of Red (Taylor’s Version). The original Speak Now lost 59% of its average weekly consumption in the 12 weeks after its counterpart was released.
The lone bright spot for the original 1989 was radio: U.S. airplay spins from the original recordings jumped 57.4% last week. Combined with airplay of the Taylor’s Version recordings, U.S. spins rose an astounding 157.4%. The catch, however, is that recordings do not earn royalties from broadcast radio performances in the United States. As a result, the original recordings’ owner, Shamrock Holdings, benefits only from the promotional value of those radio spins. Swift, however — along with various co-writers and publishing companies — earns publishing royalties when either version of 1989 recordings are played at radio.
With Taylor Swift’s re-recorded version of Speak Now topping the Billboard 200 albums chart and achieving the biggest week of 2023, the singer has pitted her new versions against the original versions she released through Big Machine Label Group in 2010. That could be seen as another blow for Shamrock Capital, which purchased Swift’s Big Machine catalog in 2020. But if Swift thought her re-recordings would erode the performance of the Big Machine originals, she was wrong — for the most part. The original versions owned by Shamrock did well through 2022 and haven’t shown much clear evidence of attrition until 2023, according to Billboard’s analysis of Luminate sales and streaming data in the United States.
Through 2022, Swift’s Big Machine catalog has performed roughly in line with industry trends. Take Swift’s 2008 album Fearless, for example: It generated on-demand audio streams of 230.5 million in 2019 and 345.3 million in 2022 — an increase of 49.8% over three years. Had the album’s streams grown in line with the industry’s annual growth in on-demand audio streams — 48.3% from 2019 to 2022 —Fearless would have had 341.9 million on-demand audio streams. That’s only a 1% variation.
The original version of Swift’s 2012 album Red did even better than Fearless, generating 283.5 million on-demand audio streams in 2019 and 484.7 million on-demand audio streams in 2022, about 19% greater than what would be expected. Had the album’s streams grown in line with the industry’s annual growth in on-demand audio streams — 17.3% in 2020, 12.7% in 2021 and 12.2% in 2022 — Red would have had 420.6 million on-demand audio streams.
At the same time, Swift’s re-recordings have done phenomenally well. Since the beginning of 2021, the three Taylor’s Version albums have accounted for 3.88 billion on-demand audio streams to the original versions’ 2.86 billion on-demand audio streams. The actual numbers are even more skewed in the Taylor’s Versions’ favor since the re-recordings of Speak Now were released on July 7 of this year and have a brief streaming history. Since 2021, Red (Taylor’s Version) has generated 2.6 times more on-demand audio streams than the original version, while Fearless (Taylor’s Version) has about 1.9 times as many on-demand audio streams.
All the work Swift did to promote her re-recordings, as well as the success of her Republic Records albums and her current U.S. tour, may have also helped sales of the original Big Machine catalog. The original version of Red has sold more albums — 26,000 — through week 28 of 2023 than in all of 2022 and is already close to surpassing sales numbers for calendar years 2019, 2020 and 2021. Speak Now has also surpassed last year’s album sales and is on track to beat annual sales from 2019 to 2021.
Of course, Shamrock does not enjoy the spoils of the three albums of re-recordings. Through week 28 of this year, Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), Fearless (Taylor’s Version) and Red (Taylor’s Version) have sold 2.23 million units in the United States. But these couldn’t be considered sales that were lost to Shamrock. Whether or not Swift re-recorded the three albums, Shamrock would benefit only from the sales of the original versions. And so far, it doesn’t appear the Taylor’s Version albums are crowding those out.
Streaming is a different story, though. There is some evidence that the Taylor’s Version reissues have led to a decline in streams for the original Big Machine albums. In the 18 weeks before the release of Red (Taylor’s Version) on Nov. 11, 2021, the original version averaged 9.7 million on-demand audio streams per week. In the 18 weeks after Red (Taylor’s Version) was released, the original version’s weekly on-demand audio streams declined 41% to 5.7 million.
And despite putting up decent streaming numbers through 2022, the original versions of Fearless and Red have underperformed expectations in 2023. The overall market’s on-demand audio streams grew 13.5% in the first 28 weeks of 2023. Had Fearless matched the market’s growth, the album would have generated about 296 million streams through week 28. Instead, the original version of Fearless had roughly 162 million streams — more than 45% below expectations. Red performed better but was also off the market’s pace. Through week 28, the original version of Red had 181.6 million on-demand audio streams — about 14% below expectations.
While the original versions have held up fairly well in purchases and, until this year, on-demand audio streams, the biggest loss is probably the lack of synch opportunities. Swift’s re-recordings have been used in a Match.com ad in 2020 (“Love Story [Taylor’s Version]”), the movie Spirit Untamed in 2021 (“Wildest Dreams [Taylor’s Version]”) and the movie DC League of Super-Pets in 2022 (“Bad Blood [Taylor’s Version], the only song from the album 1989 that has so far been re-recorded).
Ultimately, however, Swift’s re-recordings may be more responsible for her consumption boom than the original Big Machine versions. Swift’s annual on-demand audio streams more than doubled between 2019 and 2022 — from 3.12 billion to 7.85 billion. If she continues her current pace, her on-demand audio streams will increase more than 74% in 2023. The re-recordings have added to the deafening buzz around her Republic Records albums. The Big Machine originals are merely along for the ride.
Shamrock did not respond to Billboard’s request for comment on this story.
Long before Taylor Swift decided to re-record all her original songs, including the “Taylor’s Version” of 2010’s Speak Now which was released last week, Frank Sinatra did the same thing. So did Chuck Berry. And Elmo Shropshire. And many of the classic pop and rock stars who have licensed new versions of their best-known songs to movies, TV shows and commercials to keep all the royalty money over the years.
Artists re-record old hits for several different reasons: Movie and TV productions can pay them rather than their original record labels when licensing songs; they can update the tracks to sound more modern, with newer technology; they can revisit older recordings that were never properly available digitally due to contract disputes, as JoJo did; or, as with Swift, they’re having a dispute with the original label and prefer to put master recordings solely under their own control. “Our thinking was, if we do these now, they’ll be around as long as the originals, and whenever the opportunity arises, we can say, ‘Look, we’ll give you this,’ and we can undercut what whoever owns our masters are asking for,” Squeeze‘s Glenn Tilbrook told Billboard in 2019, nine years after the band put out its re-recorded greatest-hits album Spot the Difference.
Yet no one has earned as much attention — or revenue — for re-recording their songs as Swift. At first, Swift’s announcement that she would put out new versions of all her old hits seemed idiosyncratic, a retaliatory move against Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande manager Scooter Braun, who bought her six-album catalog as part of his 2019 acquisition of indie label Big Machine. But she quickly rolled out new versions of 2008’s Fearless and 2012’s Red with faithful re-recordings, fresh remixes and “from the vault” material and turned the exercise into lucrative hits: Fearless (Taylor’s Version) and Red (Taylor’s Version) have racked up 1.49 billion and 2.83 billion streams, respectively, according to Luminate, and combined sales of nearly 1.7 million units. Swift is now at the forefront of a wave of artists that have or plan to release their own re-recordings, including TLC, Wheatus, Paris Hilton and, possibly soon, Ashanti. “It’s a chance to make money, actually, for the end musicians,” says David Amels, a producer, engineer and session musician who helped Shangri-Las singer Mary Weiss re-record some of the band’s classic hits as a 2007 solo album.
In 2005, TLC negotiated a separation agreement from its longtime label, Sony Music, and re-recorded its ’90s R&B hits “Creep,” “Waterfalls” and “No Scrubs.” They first came out in the 2013 VH1 biopic CrazySexyCool: The TLC Story — without the band’s late third member, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes. The two-woman band has recently spiked in popularity, according to its longtime manager, Bill Diggins, playing a well-received set last year at the Glastonbury festival, and it plans to “start building distribution infrastructures for the new re-records.” But it wasn’t until January 2023 that singers Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins and Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas released the re-recorded versions on streaming services, without promotion or fanfare.
Although the group followed Swift’s lead in parenthetically subtitling each re-recording “(TLC Version),” Diggins says the move to re-record wasn’t inspired by Swift. “We have the utmost respect for Taylor Swift,” he says. “However, we did the re-records long before Taylor released hers and the ‘TLC Version’ was not referencing a homage to Taylor.” Still, Diggins acknowledges TLC lacks Swift’s music-business clout and massive fan army — after Red (Taylor’s Version) came out in November 2021, iHeartRadio announced its radio stations would switch to playing the new versions of her hits, but the top broadcasting company has made no such promise to TLC. “It’s not as simple as calling Spotify or Apple or iHeart and saying, ‘Play our re-records.’ You have to have enormous power to do that — which Taylor Swift certainly does,” Diggins says. “The minute you do that, the record label that owns the copyright is going to put pressure on the streaming service to play their version, because they want to collect the royalties.”
Sony owns the rights to Lopes’ voice, according to Diggins, so TLC did not have the option of splicing in original recordings of the late star. But he argues the new versions are stronger vocally because Watkins and Thomas have spent the last three decades not smoking, not drinking, leading healthy lifestyles and providing “a little bit more of new authenticity.” Still, while the new versions employed the same engineers and studios as the originals, the three tracks have been streamed a combined 218,000 times, compared to nearly 1.6 billion total for the ’90s classics — including 114 million streams for the original songs since the new versions came out in January. In the last seven months, the original versions of those three TLC hits have generated $675,725, while the re-recordings have added up to just $1,394, according to Billboard estimates.
A year ago, Ashanti told Billboard she obtained the rights to re-record her early albums from Universal Music Group and was working on a new version of her 2002 self-titled debut. (Her reps did not respond to a request for an update.) “Certain people don’t want to see you move forward and progress in life so they try to create roadblocks,” she said at the time. “I love what Taylor Swift did. Anything worth something will be a bit of a battle.”
In June, three years after pop star Kim Petras covered Paris Hilton’s 2006 hit “Stars Are Blind” on a livestream, the duo collaborated for a re-recording, with original producer and co-writer Fernando Garibay at Hilton’s studio, calling it “Paris’ Version” a la Swift. They did it for “fun, musically and creatively,” says Alex Frankel, Hilton’s music manager, adding that, from a business point of view, “It kind of aligned with my thinking.” (As with TLC, Hilton’s “Paris’ Version” subtitle was not a homage to Swift, at least overtly: “I don’t think it was a conscious choice, just felt natural, but of course probably an unconscious nod to the always iconic TS,” Frankel says.)
Hilton was “stuck with one of those contracts” with Warner Music, according to Frankel, who wouldn’t say whether Warner imposed a no-re-recording clause in her original contract: “Trying to recoup on that is nearly impossible on those deals, and the term is infinite. No one wronged her, she wasn’t doing it to spite anyone, it was more, ‘Why not revisit the song or create equity on the master side of the recording?’” The new version of “Stars Are Blind” has been streamed 699,000 times, compared to 28.3 million total for the original; since the new version’s release, the original has been streamed 726,000 times, according to Luminate. Billboard estimates the original master recording of Hilton’s track has generated nearly $4,000 for the Hilton Hotels heiress since the new version came out, while the Petras collaboration has landed roughly $5,300.
Outside of Swift, perhaps the most successful contemporary re-recording is Wheatus’ “Teenage Dirtbag,” which began as what singer Brendan Brown calls a “forensic and tedious-as-hell” project to perfectly recreate the band’s 1999 alt-rock debut, Wheatus, after, he alleges, original label Sony Music lost the ADAT masters. (A Sony rep declined to comment.) The band employed old photos to determine what gear it used 20 years earlier and puzzled over a “blip blip blip” sound in two verses that turned out to be a push-button phone tone filtered through a keyboard. “This was a CSI episode recreating some shit that happened 20 years ago that we don’t really remember,” Brown says.
After Wheatus finished the project in April 2020, and reissued the three-song EP as Teenage Dirtbag 2020 / Mope, the COVID-19 pandemic led to a TikTok-Instagram viral resurgence — “Teenage Dirtbag” became the soundtrack for celebrities reminiscing with photos of themselves in the old days. As a result, although the new version didn’t come close to the 236.6 million streams of the 1999 original, it has been streamed a respectable 4.5 million times. Meanwhile, since the new version came out, the master recording has generated a decent amount of revenue for Brown — about $24,400, according to Billboard estimates, though the original — thanks to the TikTok boost — racked up nearly $664,000 during the same period.
“We never said, ‘Listen to this, not to that.’ We just told people what we’d done and why we’d done it,” Brown says. “There was no public relations, there was no publicist. The press came to us and the conversation kind of bloomed.”
Swift is “partly responsible” for that conversation, Brown says. “There are a lot more questions about creative regulation and laws and ownership that used to be very under the hood and are now being discussed out in the open. If you have a talk show, and you’re on YouTube, it’s like, ‘I have to learn about intellectual-property law now?’ This is what we’re doing.”
Additional reporting by Ed Christman.
At first, “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” made three people laugh.
One was Randy Brooks, nephew of the late comedian Foster Brooks, who wrote the song but couldn’t convince his own group to play it. The others were Elmo Shropshire, a veterinarian, and his wife, Patsy Trigg, a bluegrass duo that performed at casinos in the Southwest under the name Elmo & Patsy. Brooks met them outside a Lake Tahoe hotel in 1979 and wound up playing them the song. Elmo & Patsy performed it as part of their act, then booked studio time and recorded it as a single.
Then it took off — first on KSFO in San Francisco, which played it as a lark, then at more and more radio stations around the country. Trigg’s parents published “Grandma” through their Tennessee gospel-music company, Kris Publishing, which meant Brooks made money every time it sold. But Shropshire, who owned the master-recording rights, turned out to be an aggressive DIY record man, recording a full-on album containing “Grandma” and lining up distribution through big drug-store chains. In 1983, it hit No. 1 on Billboard‘s Christmas Songs chart, then graduated to toys, films and TV shows. Today, it’s a holiday standard.
“It was an amazing rush,” says Trigg of the early “Grandma” days, before she and Shropshire divorced in 1985. “It was probably one of the most exciting times I’ve ever experienced.”
Billboard estimates the song’s publishing has generated $800,000, but the original Elmo & Patsy master-recording version has brought in $2.5 million through record sales and streaming over the years, all in the U.S. Much of that goes to Sony’s Epic Records, to which Shropshire signed a distribution deal in the early ’80s — meaning the veterinarian lost control of the master recordings and a lot of potential income. So Shropshire pulled a Taylor Swift-before-there-was-a-Taylor Swift and re-recorded the track under the name Dr. Elmo. His version generated an additional $7 million-plus. And that’s not even counting TV, film and toy licensing.
So the track has a happy ending — for everybody but Grandma.
“We did it all ourselves,” says Shropshire, 86, of Novato, Calif., in a phone interview between gigs performing the song at New Jersey soup kitchens and psychiatric hospitals. “We were working constantly. But it was fun. There’s something [that’s] great fun about being an entrepreneur.”
How did you come to be the performer on the song but not the songwriter?
Randy brought the song to me in Lake Tahoe. I thought it was provocative and funny. I thought the joke would be over after one or two times. At that point, I wasn’t professional enough to think about any recording business. I was still working at my veterinary hospital. I made a recording of it to give to some friends for a gag Christmas gift. One took it to a radio station in San Francisco and they started playing it. I had no idea. I was driving to work and [KSFO broadcaster] Gene Nelson said, “Well, we just played this song a little while ago, and a whole bunch of people called in and said they hated it. If we get 50 requests for it, we’ll play it again.”
How did it go from that to holiday hit?
In 1979, maybe 1980, when we first came out with the record, it was played a couple times. Right after Christmas, the bottom would drop out. At that time, there were probably 80 [record] companies. I’d send them a copy. I just had a little vinyl 45. They were interested in selling albums. I’d send a letter saying, “This is played on the radio, and I think it’s going to be good.” Almost every one would take the letter I wrote, and they had big Magic Marker on it, saying, “Stop sending me this shit!” In 1983, everybody started taping it from KSFO in San Francisco.
How did you capitalize on the radio exposure?
There were a lot of independent record distributors, but they’d [buy] 100 CDs — and at the end of a season, they’d send back, like, 98. Then we’d have to pay them back, or no money would exchange hands. My wife Pam Wendell — she was a salesperson — had the idea of making CDs and little displays and packaging them in a box and selling them to drugstore chains. We went to Longs Drugs in California. They had about 250 stores. It was different from getting them into record stores, when you usually didn’t get paid — then you’re competing with Elton John and the Eagles and your stuff goes down into the basement. Longs Drugs didn’t sell music, but at Christmas, they would put our displays out. Thirty days later, they would send us a check.
Then what happened?
We went from Longs to Eckerds, in the East. They had 3,000 stores. And we went to Costco and Sav-on — they had about 3,000 stores. Ultimately, we got into Dollar General, and they had 8,000 stores. I would try to do radio interviews. And they liked it. There was always a good angle: “Why did you sing a song where Grandma gets killed at Christmas?” I wasn’t that great of an interview, but it was fun for them and provocative. I would do interviews starting at 3 in the morning so I could be on the 6 a.m. morning shows in the East. I did probably 175 interviews every December. We lined them up every 15 minutes. That was from about 1994 until 2014.
At some point, Sony comes into the story, right? What was the story there?
In 1983, I spent a lot of money making a video. There was a man and wife in Nashville who had a little record company called Nationwide Sound Distributors. They got wind of it and said, “If you’ll sign a deal with us for a year, we’ll press 250,000.” Well, they sold all 250,000 copies, because people were hearing it for about three years, and there was no place to buy it. So the market was there. Billboard had it No. 1, in front of [Bing Crosby‘s] “White Christmas.” That’s when Epic [Records, part of CBS, later purchased by Sony] got involved and said they wanted to distribute it. It was a pretty onerous contract. I made an album of Christmas songs, so they could have an album. It probably cost $10,000 to $15,000. They gave me a $20,000 advance, but they owned everything. They sold a lot of records, and they just did nothing for promotion.
If Epic owned those recordings, you couldn’t sell the album yourself at drugstores, right? Is that why you recorded a different version?
That’s right. I re-recorded my own version of “Grandma.” We used all the same personnel. Even I can’t tell the difference.
You must be aware that’s exactly what Taylor Swift is doing. Have you followed that story?
No, I have not. No kidding! I’m so excited to hear about it.
Her record label was sold, including her original catalog. She didn’t like the people who bought the label and wanted to buy back the catalog but couldn’t. So she re-recorded all the songs and told everybody to buy and stream the new ones instead of the old ones.
I’ll tell you another thing about re-recording. Let’s say somebody wants to use the song in a movie. It’s a one-time payoff. They usually pay, I’m thinking, $25,000 for the publishing part of it to use the composition and another $25,000 for the master sound recording. So anytime somebody wants to put it on TV or a movie, [or] toys, more money comes from that than from record sales. If they use the Sony version, Sony just gives me a pittance. But if they use my version, I get the whole $25,000. This is the same with Taylor Swift.
Ah! I wasn’t even thinking about synchs.
Oh, you would not believe the times somebody would call up and say, “We want to pay X amount of dollars” — usually many thousands — “to use the composition in Jarhead.” And they’d say, “We’ve already contacted Sony and they say we can use their recording.” And I’d immediately call up the person and say, “Don’t use the Sony recording! Use ours!” That’s $25,000 out the window!
So you have to be proactive and make sure music supervisors know to use your version.
We have been on so high alert with that. Sometimes we’d have to talk ’em out of it. They’d say, “Who’s Dr. Elmo?” We’d get them to listen to it and they couldn’t tell the difference and we’d say, “We can give you a better deal.”
Did you ever recoup the $30,000 you spent on the video, and the $10,000 or $15,000 you spent in the studio for that Epic version?
Yeah, we made it up that year. That and more!
Well, I assume you have another 150 interviews to do today, so I should let you go.
No! We’re not afraid all those CDs will come back to us after the first of the year anymore. Those streams won’t come back to us. We’re not worried about that.
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