Conference Agenda

"There is a good deal of loose thinking about folk-song and dance 'belonging to the people.'" So begins a March 1936 memorandum that Ralph Vaughan Williams sent to the Executive Committee of the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS). The memo, which the composer requested to be placed in the Minutes, was occasioned by Novello & Co.’s decision to join the Performing Rights Society, the ramifications of which would eventually lead to efforts to break Cecil Sharp’s monopoly on copyrighted materials used by the EFDSS. Vaughan Williams’s memo roundly rejects the rumblings against Sharp, on the grounds that musical expertise and artistic insight is always needed to find, transcribe, and generally make known to the public material that he called a distinct "national asset."

Vaughan Williams’s attitude towards copyright is a familiar one (it was in fact shared by all Committee members, in principle) and has long been a source of ethical controversy among scholars of the 20th-century English Folk Revival who object to the "expropriation" of worker’s culture by those above them in the social hierarchy. This paper concedes the argument but also problematizes it by contextualizing the practice in the emergence of a viable music industry in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Here, copyright was an incentive for delivering folk music, via arrangements for domestic and school use as well as for civic occasions, to a large and expanding amateur music market that, by 1910, directly and indirectly employed upwards of 40,000 music professionals in England alone. That market supported millions, many of them from the working classes, in their efforts to express themselves through community music-making, besides generating cultural—that is, economic—demand for modern-day English composers determined to forge a national style. For Vaughan Williams, amateur and national music were inseparable concepts and folksong a necessary ingredient in both. These factors complicate the case against the original copyright offense, and arguably mitigate an even larger one—that of the Revival’s "mediating purpose." Revivalists did indeed seek to transfer a "national asset" from one social group to another and so culturally enrich as wide a population as possible. Copyright law was an integral and inevitable part of their success.

Throughout her 17-year career, Taylor Swift has proven to be not only a prolific songwriter and electric performer, but a savvy businesswoman changing the rules of the music industry. Swift has been particularly deft in navigating the music copyright system in both ex ante and ex post ways: preemptively preserving her rights on the one hand, while also monitoring for infringement of her songs after their release.

This paper juxtaposes two noteworthy examples of ways that Swift has used music copyright law to her advantage. First is the “Taylor’s Version” phenomenon, in which Swift rerecorded and released new versions of four of her first six albums. I begin by explaining the mechanics of music copyright law that led to Scooter Braun owning the Masters of Swift’s first six albums. I then discuss the quirk of the copyright system that allowed Swift to reclaim her songs and suggest a possible ripple effect that this could have on future artists and recording contracts.

The second example looks at Swift’s relationship with infringement. Earlier in her career, Swift both defended herself against infringement accusations (Hall v. Swift, 2017) and acquiesced to prior rightsholders by giving them cowriting credit. More recently, however, Swift has placed herself in the plaintiff’s seat against relative newcomer Olivia Rodrigo, obtaining a cowriting credit for Rodrigo’s song “Deja Vu” based on purported similarities to Swift’s “Cruel Summer.” Here, I interrogate the controversy with Rodrigo in light of Swift’s own battle to be taken seriously as a songwriter.

I conclude by reflecting on the relationship between these two examples. In the first, Swift pushes the boundaries of copyright law, seemingly trailblazing new ways for artists to reclaim rights in their work. In the second, she seems to fall into a pattern common among senior copyright holders: over-policing younger artists. Yet both examples demonstrate how the music copyright system is designed to work for established artists in ways that are inaccessible to new or less successful musicians. Has Swift changed everything about music copyright management? No. But does this make her the anti-hero, or just another piece of a broken system?