Taylor Swift has posted on Tumblr about her masters being sold to Scooter Braun:

For years I asked, pleaded for a chance to own my work. Instead I was given an opportunity to sign back up to Big Machine Records and ‘earn’ one album back at a time, one for every new one I turned in. I walked away because I knew once I signed that contract, Scott Borchetta would sell the label, thereby selling me and my future. I had to make the excruciating choice to leave behind my past. Music I wrote on my bedroom floor and videos I dreamed up and paid for from the money I earned playing in bars, then clubs, then arenas, then stadiums. […]

This is my worst case scenario. This is what happens when you sign a deal at fifteen to someone for whom the term ‘loyalty’ is clearly just a contractual concept. And when that man says ‘Music has value’, he means its value is beholden to men who had no part in creating it.

Capitalism is destructive to most industries, but it’s always felt specifically exploitative to me in the arts.

Alex Suskind, writing at Entertainment Weekly:

Then, during the Reputation Tour, she had an epiphany: that despite the caricature that she thought had been created of her, there were many people who saw what others had simply refused to. “I would look out into the audience and I’d see these amazing, thoughtful, caring, wonderful, empathetic people,” she says. “So often with our takedown culture, talking s— about a celebrity is basically the same as talking s— about the new iPhone. So when I go and I meet fans, I see that they actually see me as a flesh-and-blood human being. That — as contrived as it may sound — changed [me] completely, assigning humanity to my life.”

Taylor Swift has launched a countdown clock on her website counting down to Friday, April 26th.