As Prince famously told Rolling Stone in 1996, “If you don’t own your masters, your master owns you.” And that was before Prince’s own battles with streaming companies. If Swift wanted to remove the Taylor’s Version records from Spotify, presumably she could, but not the original versions. A dispute over masters ownership is what led Taylor Swift, in 2019, to begin re-recording her back catalog. Labels often strike deals to secure artists’ “master rights,” in other words the copyright to the original or “master” version of a sound recording (as opposed to the copyright to the underlying composition, or the notes and lyrics written on a page). copyright law directly affect the way Americans consume music. The contractual obstacles to an artist of even Young’s stature pulling their recordings from Spotify underscores how the byzantine details of U.S. “I want to thank my truly great and supportive record company Warner Brothers-Reprise Records, for standing with me in my decision to pull all my music from Spotify.” “Before I told my friends at Warner Bros about my desire to leave the Spotify platform, I was reminded by my own legal forces that contractually I did not have the control of my music to do that,” Young wrote on his website on January 26. In fact, even Young had to rely on the good graces of his record label. Most artists simply don’t have the legal right to remove their music from one streaming platform or another. Regardless of where one sits in the endless streaming debates, the answer is: probably not.
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