One tweet from Kelly Clarkson in 2019 helped spark one of the most audacious moves in music industry history — and Taylor Swift has been sending flowers ever since.
When Big Machine Label Group was acquired by talent manager Scooter Braun for around $300 million in June 2019, the deal included the master recordings of Swift's first six studio albums. Swift said she learned about the sale the same day it was announced to the public, calling it her "worst case scenario." She had tried for years to buy her masters outright and was denied.
To understand why, you have to understand what those six albums actually were. Swift signed with Big Machine at 15 years old. The recordings Braun now owned weren't just catalog — they were her entire adolescence and young adulthood on tape. Taylor Swift was her at 16. Fearless was her at 18, winning her first Grammy. Red was her first major heartbreak processed in public. 1989 was the album that made her a global pop phenomenon. Reputation was her at her lowest, fighting back. She had tried for years to buy her masters outright and was denied each time. In her statement the day of the sale, she wrote: "This is what happens when you sign a deal at fifteen to someone for whom the term 'loyalty' is clearly just a contractual concept."
Clarkson responded by posting a blueprint on Twitter. Her suggestion: re-record every song Swift didn't own, release the new versions with fresh artwork, and give fans enough incentive to abandon the originals entirely. Make the old recordings worth less by making something better.
The story gets more complicated before it gets cleaner. Just over a year after the initial sale, Braun sold Swift's catalog to private equity firm Shamrock Capital for over $300 million, netting roughly what he had paid for all of Big Machine, with Swift's catalog doing most of the work. Swift said this was the second time her music had been sold without her knowledge. She also alleged Braun's team demanded she sign an NDA preventing her from speaking negatively about him before she could even review the financials — a condition she refused.
So she re-recorded everything instead. Starting in November 2020, when her contract allowed her to legally begin, Swift launched the Taylor's Version project. All four re-releases — Fearless, Red, Speak Now, and 1989 — debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200. The originals steadily lost streaming ground. The plan worked exactly as Clarkson described.
The Reddit community r/todayilearned surfaced the flowers detail this week to 25,000 upvotes, with commenters drawing comparisons to Prince, who threatened a similar maneuver against Warner Brothers in 1999 — changing his name to an unpronounceable symbol to legally erode their ownership of it — but never fully executed the re-recording strategy.
Clarkson confirmed the flowers in an interview with E! News, noting Swift also sent a cardigan after the 1989 re-release. "She's a very smart businesswoman," Clarkson said. "If they're going to find a loophole, you find a loophole. And she did it."
In May 2025, Swift bought her master's back from Shamrock Capital. She now owns the recordings, music videos, album art, and unreleased songs from her entire catalog.
Two Taylor's Version albums remain unreleased: Reputation and her 2006 self-titled debut. The situation around both shifted significantly in May 2025 when Swift bought back her masters — removing the original commercial motivation for re-recording entirely. She disclosed that her debut is already fully re-recorded and she's happy with it, but that Reputation remains barely started, the album too emotionally specific to a difficult period to easily revisit. Both may still come. Neither is imminent. Clarkson may be waiting on those last two deliveries for a while.
