What Taylor Swift’s Masters Fight Teaches Us About Estate Planning
Four lessons on why ownership, control, and a clear estate plan matter.
On May 30, 2025, Taylor Swift announced that she had bought back the master recordings of her first six albums. It was one of the most celebrated business stories in music, and it’s also a lesson in why ownership matters, who controls your assets, and what happens when you don’t plan ahead.
The story in short
In 2019, Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings acquired Big Machine Label Group, which owned the masters to her first six albums. In 2020 those masters were sold again, this time to Shamrock Holdings. Most importantly, Taylor said she was never given a real chance to buy her own work, and both sales happened without her having a say.
Her response was to re-record the albums, producing “Taylor’s Version” releases she would own outright. Six years after the fight began, she bought the originals back, along with music videos, concert films, album art, photography, and unreleased songs, but she was only able to do this because of a combination of having 360 million dollars to spend and the opportunity to buy them. Not everyone has these two.
Lesson 1: Your most valuable assets may not be your house
Taylor’s masters were worth far more than any one piece of property. Likewise, many of us have assets that are easy to overlook:
Intellectual property, such as books, music, photography, designs, and software
Business ownership and partnership interests
Digital assets, including domains, online stores, social accounts, and crypto
Royalties and other ongoing income streams
If you create or own things like these, they need to be named and accounted for in your plan. Unlisted assets can end up stuck, disputed, or lost.
Learn more about overlooked assets in our previous post "You may have more assets than you think".
Lesson 2: Ownership and control are different things
Taylor lost control of her recordings even though she wrote the songs. Estate planning is partly about separating who benefits from an asset from who manages it. Tools like trusts, powers of attorney, and named executors let you decide who makes the decisions, and when, rather than leaving it to chance.
Lesson 3: If you don’t decide who controls your assets, someone else will
Taylor’s work changed hands twice because she didn’t own it. Estate planning has the same logic: if you haven’t named who receives your property and who manages it, state law makes those decisions for you. That default may not match what you want; it’s a rule applied to
Lesson 4: A fight over assets can outlast the people it’s about
Prince died in 2016 without a known will, and his estate spent years in court sorting out who should inherit and who should manage his legacy. Disputes like that cost money, take time, and strain families, so a clear, current plan is one of the best ways to prevent them.everyone, not a plan made for you.
Where to start
You don’t need to be a pop star to need a plan. The basics:
Take inventory. List everything you own, including digital and creative assets.
Write a will. Name your beneficiaries, your executor, and, if you have children, their guardians.
Consider a trust. Depending on your situation, one can help avoid probate and manage assets over time.
Check your beneficiary designations. Retirement accounts and life insurance often pass by the designation on file, not by your will.
Name decision-makers. A financial power of attorney and a healthcare directive cover the times you can’t speak for yourself.
Review it regularly. Marriages, births, new businesses, and moves all call for updates.
An end, and a beginning
Taylor closed this chapter by owning what she made, and that took years of strategy and persistence. Estate planning is a quieter version of the same idea: deciding for yourself what happens to what you’ve built, instead of letting someone else decide. The era of leaving it to chance can end for you too.
