Kelly Clarkson, our country’s beloved cover queen, has thought long and hard about how Taylor Swift can prevail over her unfortunate masters-ownership drama with Scooter Braun, and she might have just cracked the code: Go back to the studio, and do it all again. In a Twitter message directed at Swift on Saturday evening, Clarkson advised her peer that the best course of action might be for Swift to rerecord all of her songs from Taylor Swift to Speak Now to 1989 and release them, knowing her fans will flock to purchase anything she releases. This move would ensure Swift would own the new versions, thus rendering the old masters obsolete. (JoJo did something similar, and it was a success.)
“Just a thought, you should go in and re-record all the songs that you don’t own the masters on exactly how you did them but put brand new art and some kind of incentive so fans will no longer buy the old versions,†Clarkson wrote to Swift. “I’d buy all of the new versions just to prove a point.â€
Earlier this month, Braun (a celebrity manager, who most notably manages big names like Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande) acquired Swift’s former label, Big Machine, which still owns all of her masters. In a blog post, Swift outlined the extent of her devastation with the acquisition. “Scooter has stripped me of my life’s work, that I wasn’t given an opportunity to buy,†she wrote. “Essentially, my musical legacy is about to lie in the hands of someone who tried to dismantle it. This is my worst case scenario.†It’s estimated that Braun paid $300 million to acquire Big Machine and its catalogue.