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Reputation (Taylor's Version)

Incomplete

This article is about the re-recording. For the original album, see reputation (2017).

Reputation (Taylor’s Version) is the incomplete re-recording of Taylor’s sixth studio album, reputation (2017). It became eligible for re-recording on November 10, 2022, the fifth anniversary of its original release. However, as of 2025, Taylor revealed that she had re-recorded less than a quarter of the album. Following her announcement that she had regained full ownership of the original reputation masters, she confirmed that a complete re-release of the album as Taylor’s Version would not move forward.

Taylor dove headfirst into full-throttle pop with 2014’s 1989, launching her into global stardom—“an imperial phase,” as she described it in her “Person of the Year” interview with TIME in 2023. But with that meteoric rise came a steeper fall. Public sentiment began to shift. Critics accused her of overexposure, and conspiracy theories swirled around her political silence.

Then came the breaking point: in 2016, rapper Kanye West released a song with vulgar lyrics about Taylor, claiming she had approved them. Taylor denied it. His then-wife, Kim Kardashian, later posted a selectively edited video of a phone call that appeared to show Taylor giving her blessing. The scandal ignited a media frenzy. Suddenly, she was branded a snake, a symbol that would come to define this chapter of her life.

“I had all the hyenas climb on and take their shots,” she said. “Make no mistake—my career was taken away from me.” For Taylor, it felt like a professional death. It was one of the darkest moments of her public life:

«You have a fully manufactured frame job, in an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a liar. That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before. I moved to a foreign country. I didn’t leave a rental house for a year. I was afraid to get on phone calls. I pushed away most people in my life because I didn’t trust anyone anymore. I went down really, really hard.»

Taylor Swift

At the end of 2017, Taylor eventually fought back with reputation. As she famously declares in “Look What You Made Me Do”: “Sorry, the old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now. Why? ’Cause she’s dead!” It sparked questions about whether the Taylor of the past was truly gone. On reputation, she successfully embraced and exaggerated the media’s portrayal of her, crafting a larger-than-life caricature of the petty, vindictive “snake” she had been reduced to. Yet by the album’s end, the mask begins to slip. Amid the ruins of her public image, she confronts the fallout of fame and finds something more enduring: redemption through love.

Background

Under her contract with Big Machine Records, Taylor released six studio albums between 2006 and 2017. When her contract expired in November 2018, she parted ways with the label and signed a new deal with New York City based Republic Records, a division of Universal Music Group. This new agreement ensured that she would own the master recordings of all her future releases. In a social media post at the time, Taylor expressed her gratitude to Big Machine founder and its Scott Borchetta “for guiding me through over a decade of work that I will always be so proud of,” while also celebrating a milestone: “It’s also incredibly exciting to know that I’ll own all of my master recordings that I make from now on.”

In June 2019, American businessman Scooter Braun, through his company Ithaca Holdings, acquired Big Machine Label Group—and with it, the master recordings of Taylor’s first six studio albums, including reputation. Taylor immediately denounced the acquisition, citing a lack of transparency and her strong disapproval of Braun. In response, she announced her intention to re-record those six albums in order to reclaim ownership of her work.

In November 2020, Braun sold the masters to Shamrock Holdings, a private equity firm backed by the Disney estate. However, the deal allowed Braun and Ithaca Holdings to continue profiting from the catalog—a condition Taylor opposed. That same month, she officially began the process of re-recording her first six studio albums.

Teasers

Throughout her re-recording project, Taylor repeatedly teased Reputation (Taylor’s Version), most notably by licensing re-recorded snippets of songs like “Look What You Made Me Do” and “Delicate” for various TV shows. In her TIME “Person of the Year” interview in late 2023, she spoke openly about re-recording the album:

«It’s a goth-punk moment of female rage at being gaslit by an entire social structure. I think a lot of people see it and they’re just like, 'Sick snakes and strobe lights.' [...] I’m collecting horcruxes. I’m collecting infinity stones. Gandalf’s voice is in my head every time I put out a new one. For me, it is a movie now.»

Taylor Swift

She promised that the upcoming vault tracks for Reputation (Taylor’s Version) would be “fire.”

Gaining Ownership of All Her Music

In one of the most dramatic business moves in pop music history, Taylor finally succeeded in purchasing the master recordings of her first six studio albums in spring 2025—nearly six years after they were first sold without her consent. She acquired the catalog, along with associated visuals, from its most recent owner, Shamrock Capital, for an undisclosed nine-figure sum. Taylor characterized the deal as “exceptionally fair and reasonable.”

Naturally, fans wondered what this meant for her re-recording project. In a public statement released on May 30, 2025, Taylor explained that she had delayed work on Reputation (Taylor’s Version) multiple times due to two key reasons. First, she found it emotionally difficult to revisit the era, having previously described it as the “lowest point” in her life and admitting that every attempt to re-record the material led her to an emotional “stopping point.” Second, she expressed that she did not feel she could improve upon the original recordings, which were created in the midst of intense personal turmoil and with a specific creative urgency that, she noted, could not be replicated. As a result, by 2025, Taylor had completed less than a quarter of the re-recording. She detailed:

«I know, I know. What about Rep TV? Full transparency. I haven’t even re-recorded a quarter of it. The reputation album was so specific to that time in my life, and I kept hitting a stopping point when I tried to remake it. All that defiance, that longing to be understood while feeling purposely misunderstood, that desperate hope, that shame-born snarl and mischief. To be perfectly honest, it’s the one album in those first 6 that I thought couldn’t be improved upon by redoing it. Not the music, or photos, or videos. So I kept putting it off. There will be a time (if you’re into the idea) for the unreleased Vault tracks from that album to hatch. [...] But if it happens, it won’t be from a place of sadness and longing for what I wish I could have. It will just be a celebration now.»

Taylor Swift

It’s hard to understate just how much fans had been yearning for Reputation (Taylor’s Version) before this news. Perhaps for the same reasons Taylor found it difficult to re-record, Swifties knew that it would be a particularly special album to revisit.

Although the full re-recorded reputation album will likely never be released, Taylor did indicate that she is open to releasing its vault tracks—previously unreleased songs written during the reputation era. However, she did not confirm a timeline or format for their potential release.