MBW Reacts is a series of analytical commentaries from Music Business Worldwide written in response to major recent entertainment events or news stories. Only MBW+ subscribers have unlimited access to these articles. The below article originally appeared in Tim Ingham’s latest MBW+ Review email, issued exclusively to MBW+ subscribers this week.
To understand how clever Taylor Swift’s team is, fire up Google.
For my money, Swift has only made one major career blunder over the past six years: her starring role in the 2019 Hollywood stinker Cats. A film so bad, Ricky Gervais memorably called it “the worst thing to happen to cats… since dogs”.
Yet plonk “Taylor Swift Cats” into the globe’s favorite search engine today and you’ll struggle to spot any evidence that this much-maligned movie ever existed.
Instead, you’ll find multiple SEO-dominant press articles (People, Cosmopolitan, US Weekly), plus one prominent Reddit forum, all focused on the trio of domestic felines that Taylor keeps as pets.
You’ll even find, on page one of Google, a handsomely furnished Wikipedia page for one of Swift’s moggies, Olivia Benson.
Forget ‘Taylor Swift in Cats’. Did you mean ‘Taylor Swift’s cats’?
You can’t convince me that any of this is coincidence.
To my mind, it’s perfect/purrfect evidence that Swift and her self-run organization can exert more influence on the internet, and its consumers, than most corporations could ever dream of.
She’s capable of globally exploding her proudest and most lucrative moments (see: Eras tour ticket sales). And, like a Mr Wolf of the internet, she and her media acolytes can largely wipe clean her mistakes – as if they never happened.
This all provides a sensible justification as to why Swift just spent hundreds of millions of dollars buying the master rights to her first six albums from Shamrock Holdings.
The logic: By leveraging her own peerless fan-activating channels, Swift can trigger more interest in these records than arguably any other entity on earth. Especially a publicity-shy private equity firm with no real ability to directly persuade or motivate consumers.
We don’t need to re-live the full extent of the Swift masters saga here. But according to MBW’s sources, Shamrock paid Scooter Braun a total of $405 million for the masters to Swift’s first six albums via a 2020 deal. That price included $360 million upfront plus a subsequent $45 million earn-out based on performance.
Reading between the lines of various recent media reports, it seems Shamrock may just have sold Swift her masters for a similar fee to the $405 million it paid to get them.
This would certainly explain Swift’s enthusiasm for Shamrock’s behavior during the process. (Swift wrote the other week: “This was a business deal to [Shamrock], but… I am endlessly thankful. My first tattoo might just be a huge shamrock in the middle of my forehead.”)
If Shamrock didn’t make a bundle of profit from the sale, don’t let your heart bleed. Remember that the firm has absorbed almost five solid years of royalty cash-flow from these assets, during a period when Swift has ascended to never-before-seen commercial heights.
Yet, over and above the appeal of a quiet PE firm retreating from all the Swiftian drama (Taylor’s Versions et al), you have to wonder why Shamrock and its music heads (including the well-liked Patrick Russo) decided to flip these assets of the world’s biggest megastar… now.
One theory: it’s all about Shamrock’s awareness of the future of the music rights business – and how essential the ‘portfolio effect’ will be for anyone looking to claim a sizable chunk of it in the years ahead.
According to the IFPI, Taylor Swift’s recorded music has generated more than any other artist on the planet for the past three years in a row.
But here’s the thing about being the world’s biggest megastar in 2025: your dominance of the overall market, just like that of a major record company, is continually being nibbled into by an endless stream of music you don’t own.
Firstly, there’s the continuing wave of self-uploading artists to consider – a key factor in the addition of around 99,000 tracks per day onto streaming services.
There’s also the incoming tsunami of AI-generated music from the likes of Suno and Udio. (Did you see that ‘Masters Of Prophecy’ – a hub for AI-made Musak – reportedly just overtook Mr. Beast to become YouTube‘s fastest-growing channel?)
Finally, and most importantly, there’s the rise of what might once have been termed ‘regional’ music – and its increasing impact on global charts.
From Luminate‘s 2024 annual report: “English-speaking markets are losing local share to non-English language imports…while many non-English speaking markets show local content gaining share.”
Artists from the United States lost 0.20% market share of premium streams in the US last year; globally, they lost 0.44%.
Despite Swift’s massive popularity, as a market share proposition, even she is being affected by these trends.
According to my reading of Luminate data, Swift claimed approximately 0.9% of the 1.4 trillion total on-demand audio streams in the United States last year.
In industry parlance, Swift is (in and of herself) a very significant independent label.
But it would be a shock if her share of global streams (and therefore her share of streaming’s revenue ‘pie’) didn’t continue declining in the years ahead.
This brings us to the ‘portfolio effect’.
Companies like Universal Music Group have grown used to seeing artists like Taylor Swift negotiate deals under which they keep ownership of their copyrights – and receive higher royalty margins than they once did.
UMG is therefore adjusting to a lower-margin reality when it comes to frontline music in 2025.
Yet, simultaneously, major music companies are working hard to avoid being overly exposed to the fortunes of any one artist.
Indeed, UMG’s Top 50 artists only accounted for 24% of its recorded music revenue in 2024.
In its latest annual report, the company wrote, “Our extraordinarily diverse roster of artists… means that our business’ success is not reliant on one artist or even a small number of artists.”
Like its fellow majors, UMG faces its own market share challenges from (a) the endless influx of music onto streaming services and (b) the changing listening patterns of global music fans.
This is partly why Universal is investing $775 million to buy Downtown — to bolster its market share across publishing and records, while further lessening its reliance on the superstar economy.
In contrast, for a passive investor like Shamrock, betting everything on a single megastar, however dominant, is a dangerous gamble. As musical attention becomes increasingly democratized, even the mightiest individual catalog faces structural headwinds.
In terms of her own legacy, then, Taylor Swift has just reclaimed control. But she’s done so in a marketplace where ‘control’ is an increasingly foreign concept.Music Business Worldwide
