What Does Taylor Swift Buying Back Her Masters Mean for ‘Reputation (Taylor’s Version)’?

After six long years and four album re-records, Taylor Swift has finally won back control of her masters. But what does that mean for the long-awaited, highly anticipated Reputation (Taylor’s Version)?

In a letter on her website announcing that she’d finally been able to purchase back the rights to her first six albums from Shamrock Capital Friday (May 30), the pop star addressed just that. “I know, I know. What about Rep TV?” Swift began in her note.

“Full: transparency: I haven’t even re-recorded a quarter of it,” she continued. “The Reputation album was so specific to that time in my life, and I kept hitting a stopping point when I tried to remake it. All that defiance, that longing to be understood while feeling purposely misunderstood, that desperate hope, that shame-born snarl and mischief. To be perfectly honest, it’s the one album in those first six that I thought couldn’t be improved upon by redoing it.”

For those reasons, Swift says she “kept putting it off” when it came time to re-record Reputation. Now that she owns the masters to the original album, she doesn’t technically need to remake it — but she did add, “There will be a time (if you’re into the idea) for the unreleased Vault tracks from that album to hatch.”

After releasing new versions of her Fearless, Speak Now, Red and 1989 albums over the past few years, Reputation was one of two albums left for her to re-record in the series of six LPs she’d made while still signed to Scott Borchetta’s Big Machine Label Group. One of the biggest feuds in music history erupted into the court of public opinion in 2019 when Borchetta sold the company — along with Swift’s catalog — to Scooter Braun, something the “Fortnight” singer at the time called her “worst case scenario” due to Braun’s “incessant, manipulative bullying” she accused him of directing her way over the years.

Her catalog later traded hands again when Braun sold it to Shamrock in late 2020. In the years since the original sale, Swift has kept fans on their toes with the unveilings of each Taylor’s Version album — each of which has featured a handful of “From the Vault” tracks written in years past that were never previously released. Besides Reputation, the only other album she still had left to re-record was her 2006 self-titled debut, about which she wrote in Friday’s letter, “I’ve already completely re-recorded my entire debut album, and I really love how it sounds now.”

“Those 2 albums can still have their moments to re-emerge when the time is right, if that would be something you guys would be excited about,” she wrote of Reputation and Taylor Swift. “But if it happens, it won’t be from a place of sadness and longing for what I wish I could have. It will just be a celebration now.”

It’s hard to understate just how much fans have been yearning for Reputation (Taylor’s Version). Perhaps for the same reasons Swift found it difficult to re-record, her Swifties knew that it would be a particularly special LP to revisit; the original spent four weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and served as an artistic reinvention for the musician at a time where she felt villainized by the public following her public fall-out with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West.

With that in mind, Swifties had been eagerly awaiting a Rep TV announcement for years, routinely getting excited when seeming Easter eggs and clues appeared to indicate that it was coming. Just recently, a widely circulated fan theory that she would unveil news of the re-record at the 2025 American Music Awards led to a streaming boost for the original Reputation, even though she didn’t even end up attending the ceremony.

The anticipation was only amplified whenever Swift doled out tastes of the elusive Reputation re-record through synch placements, licensing Rep singles “Delicate” to Prime Video’s The Summer I Turned Pretty and “Look What You Made Me Do (Taylor’s Version)” to Apple TV+’s The Dynasty: New England Patriots and Prime Video’s Wilderness. Earlier in May, a long sample of the updated “Look What You Made Me Do” — which originally spent three weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 — played in the opening sequence of an episode of The Handmaid’s Tale, once again reigniting excitement for Reputation (Taylor’s Version).

Now that a Reputation (Taylor’s Version) seems more unlikely than ever, fans will just have to hope that the Vault tracks come soon. And for now, Swift is making sure they know how thankful she is for their support.

“You’ll never know how much it means to me that you cared,” she ended Friday’s letter. “Thanks to you and your goodwill, teamwork and encouragement, the best things that have ever been mine… finally actually are.”