What Taylor Swift Understood About Leverage

What do you do when someone owns something you want, and they won’t sell it to you?

In 2019, the master recordings of Taylor Swift’s first six albums changed hands when her former label, Big Machine, was acquired by Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings. Swift said publicly that she hadn’t been given the chance to buy them. In 2020 the masters were sold on again, to the investment firm Shamrock Capital.

Most people in that position would argue. Appeal. Make a better offer. Make a louder case.

She did something else. She started re-recording the albums.

Fearless (Taylor’s Version) came out in April 2021. Others followed. Fans had a version they could choose instead of the original.

Then, in May 2025, Swift announced that she had bought back her original masters.

Here’s what interests me. For years the conversation was framed as a negotiation over a price. But the most powerful move wasn’t made at the negotiating table at all. It was made in a recording studio.

Negotiation researchers call this your BATNA: your best alternative to a negotiated agreement. It’s what you’ll do if no deal happens. And it’s the single biggest source of power in most negotiations, far more than charm, argument or persistence.

The problem is that most of us treat our alternative as fixed. We walk into a negotiation, notice we have no good fallback, and try to compensate with better tactics.

Swift treated her alternative as something she could build. Every re-recording made her less dependent on the thing she couldn’t get.

Think about how often this applies. The employee who asks for a raise without ever having looked at the job market. The business that negotiates with its one big client without developing a second. The tenant who argues with a landlord without knowing what else is available.

You can’t always win the argument. But you can often change what happens if you lose it. And once you’ve done that, the argument tends to go differently.

A great deal of Marta Skarbek’s This is Negotiation is about preparation, and this is the part of preparation people skip most often: improving your alternative before you ask, not after you’ve been refused.

Which leaves a question worth answering honestly. In the most important negotiation you’re facing right now, what’s your alternative? And when did you last try to make it better, rather than just hoping you won’t need it?

Find the book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Marta-Skarbeks-This-Negotiation-negotiator/dp/B0D7VXFV7S

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