Taylor's upcoming re-recordings of her earlier albums with her former record label, Big Machine Label Group, is estimated to come out in November 2021. Fans have already been treated to a small re-recording of "Love Story" that was used for an end of year commercial for Match.com.

Taylor is re-recording her first 6 albums because she doesn't own what are known as "Master Recordings" due to mismanagement at Big Machine Label Group. It's a complicated issue — and the reason why Taylor's back in the studio rerecording Taylor Swift, Fearless, Speak Now, Red, 1989 and reputation.

The new recordings of her albums will bring excitement to Swifties everywhere. I wanted to take a look at what it could mean for Swifties and some other effects on the music industry. I'll be looking at sales numbers, new songs and lastly, her voice.

Sales

Taylor has sold over 50 million albums through the end of 2020. 45.4 million of the 50 million albums sold are from the albums she's re-recording. This represents just over 90% of her entire collection of music. As at the chart below shows, Taylor's sales numbers have been astronomical; she's completely owned the last decade in music sales.

Source 1^*

While I think Taylor's new releases will move a lot of inventory, the music industry has changed since in the last 10 years due to streaming. If Taylor captures even one-third of her previous sales (actual sales, not streaming) from the re-recordings, I think it will be a success.

New Songs

Taylor has already hinted that she will have some "treats" in her upcoming re-recordings. A short clip from a re-recording of "Love Story" already appeared in a commercial for Match.com. While the rerecordings of her songs will have a life of their own, I also think that we'll get two things with the new albums:

New songs written specifically for these new album releases

Taylor has probably had ideas in her head of new songs that she would've loved to have added to each album "era" after its release. Or since the announcement of her rerecording her "old" music, she’s gone back to writing tunes for the upcoming albums.

New (Old) songs that didn't make the cut from her previous releases.

Taylor has about 137 songs written throughout her 9 album releases (excluding one off songs or songs written for other artists). This is an average of 15 albums per album. There’s got to be ~2-3 songs associated with her old albums that didn’t make the final "cut" to appear on the album. Maybe these songs will appear in these new releases?

Ballads

For fans, it'd be great if we could see her include some ballads from her different tours throughout the years. I know I was a huge fan of her ballads from the 1989 World Tour and the reputation Tour. It's how I discovered that I loved some of her older songs like "Enchanted" and "Long Live".

One of the best things about her tours have been the ballads that she creates by stringing her songs together into a never before heard piece.

From the 1989 World Tour, she mixed together "Enchanted" and "Wildest Dreams" playing it solo on a piano that got the crowd involved. From the reputation Stadium Tour, she took it a step further created 3 different ballads, which included:

• "Style”, "Love Story" and "You Belong with Me"
• "Bad Blood" and "Should’ve Said No"
• "Long Live" and "New Years Day"

Voice

Taylor's voice has changed and matured over the years since she released her self-titled album Taylor Swift at the tender age of 16. Now at the age of 31, she’s recording songs from as long as 14 years ago. There’s no doubt songs like "Teardrops on my Guitar" and "Tim McGraw" will sound different.

It'll be a huge treat for fans to hear Taylor sing songs from earlier in her career. Songs that fans might have grown up with heard for years in a different voice will get a new treatment as Taylor sings the songs again for her re-recordings. Recordings from her earlier material will also achieve what Swifties have been asking for for the last 3 or 4 albums; they want Taylor to go back to her country roots. While we fans might not ever hear Taylor create a completely new album using country twang, Taylor re-recording using sounds from Taylor Swift might be just enough to fill that request!

While Swifties have about 10 more months to wait before the re-recordings drop, I think Taylor must be having a blast going back and recording all her older material for her fans. In her Netflix special, "reputation Stadium Tour", she had this to say about her old songs before she sang "All Too Well":

"You guys were saying to me online, 'I really want you to play older songs that you don't play very often'. And this tradition kind of came about. I'm really glad you told me to do that, because it's fun, it's super fun going back through and playing songs I haven't played in forever..."

Source 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Swift_albums_discography