Taylor Swift still gets emotional when she thinks about the moment she reclaimed her master recordings after years of working to do so, as evidenced by her appearance on Travis Kelce‘s New Heights podcast.

In the episode posted Wednesday (Aug. 13), the pop star teared up while recalling how she collapsed into her boyfriend’s arms after receiving the news, which the world would only learn in May when Swift announced that she’d purchased the rights to her first six albums from Shamrock Holdings in a letter on her website. It was a big moment for both the star and her fanbase, as the 14-time Grammy winner had been vocal about her devastation with the initial sale of her masters to Scooter Braun in 2019 — which she said “ripped my heart out of my chest” on New Heights — shortly after which it changed hands again to Shamrock.

“Since I was a teenager, I’ve been saving up money to buy my music back,” she recalled on the podcast as the tight end rubbed her hand affectionately. “I thought about not owning my music every day … it was like an intrusive thought.”

According to Swift, it wasn’t members of her team who negotiated the deal with Shamrock — it was her mom, Andrea, and her brother, Austin. Andrea was also the one who broke the news that they’d closed the deal with the investment company in an emotional phone call with her daughter.

“She was like, ‘You got your music,’ and I literally hit the floor,” Swift said. “Bawling my eyes out, just weeping.”

At first unable to believe that the news was real, the 14-time Grammy winner says she eventually went into another room, where Kelce was obliviously playing video games. “I’m like, ‘Just go tell Travis in a normal way,'” she said, cracking up at the memory of how her voice broke as soon as she started speaking to the Kansas City Chiefs star, despite trying to keep her composure.

Swift added that her boyfriend immediately ditched his console and wrapped her in his arms, at which point she started “absolutely heaving.”

Kelce admitted that he was also “weeping” in the moment, noting that his superstar girlfriend was “just dead weight” in his arms.

Elsewhere on the podcast, Swift shared more details about her new album, The Life of a Showgirl, which she announced Tuesday (Aug. 12) via a teaser clip from her guest New Heights episode. Arriving Oct. 3, the LP will mark her first full-length since reclaiming her masters three months ago.

Though fans are hopeful that they’ll still get a re-release for Swift’s debut album — and possibly even Vault tracks for the never-finished Reputation (Taylor’s Version) — the purchase of her masters also marked something of an end to her yearslong re-recording project. Over the past six years, the musician has released revamped versions of Fearless, Speak Now, Red and 1989, which Swift said on New Heights was a process she “defiantly” decided to embark on.

While re-recording her albums, Swift said on New Heights that she was able to fall back in love with one of them. “Red was very special,” she said, noting that Vault track “All Too Well (10 Minute Version)” is “maybe my favorite song I’ve ever written.”

“I’ve always loved Fearless and 1989 in a very pure way,” she added. “Red I’ve always gone back and forth … but the re-record really made me love that album.”

Watch Swift’s episode of New Heights below.

The music subscription business will continue to grow through 2026 thanks to customer acquisition, price increases and the launch of high-priced superfan tiers, according to a new report by Guggenheim analysts who cover public music companies.

A wave of price increases in 2022 and 2023 subsided in 2024, leading to lower — but still substantial — revenue growth rates in 2025. Recently announced quarterly results have showed “healthy industry-wide trends” despite “minimal” benefits from price increases, analysts wrote in the report released Wednesday (Aug. 13). Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group both reported solid subscription revenue growth of 8.5% for the quarter, while Sony Music (which does not break out subscription figures) saw streaming growth of 7.3%.

Guggenheim estimates that the number of streaming subscribers grew 11.6% in the second quarter, which compares well to the previous five quarters (which ranged from 12.0% to 12.8%). Analysts say Spotify and YouTube Music had the best growth, while Amazon Music, Apple Music and Tencent Music Entertainment (TME), as well as smaller services such as Pandora and Deezer, had below-average growth.  

Looking ahead, Guggenheim sees ample potential subscribers in both mature and developed markets. Its analysts expect subscriber growth to remain in the double digits through the end of 2025 — 11.1% and 10.1% in the third and fourth quarters, respectively — and “gradually decelerate over time.”

While global growth rates remain in the double digits, subscriber and revenue growth have slowed in large markets such as the U.S., where subscription revenue growth fell to 5.3% in 2024 from 10.6% in 2023, and growth in subscribers fell to 3.3% from 5.7%, according to the RIAA. A similar trend was seen in the U.K., the world’s third-largest recorded music market, where subscription revenue growth fell to 5.9% in 2024 from 8.1% in 2023, according to BPI. 

Recent and upcoming price increases will provide revenue growth for streaming services and rights holders. The analysts say fourth quarter revenue will get an assist from Spotify’s decision, announced on Aug. 4, to raise prices in “multiple markets” across Europe, Asia-Pacific, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. Guggenheim and many other analysts expect subscription revenue growth in 2026 to come from subscription service price increases following record labels’ recent licensing renewals.  

While Guggenheim expects much-awaited superfan tiers to launch in 2026, only one subscription service, TME, has launched one to date, with the Chinese streaming leader revealing on Monday (Aug. 11) that it had 15 million subscribers to its Super VIP tier at the end of June. Spotify chief business officer Alex Norström explained during the streamer’s July 29 earnings call that the company is building “something great” for superfans, “but it’s taking time” to produce something up to Spotify’s “high value standards.”    

Superfan offerings, which will provide heightened experiences and features for a higher price, are expected to boost streaming services’ average revenue per user (ARPU) and return additional royalties to rights holders. Super VIP is having the expected effect on TME’s ARPU, which increased 9.3% on 6.3% subscriber growth in the second quarter. Without a superfan tier to provide a lift, Spotify’s ARPU increased 3% (in constant currency) with 12% subscriber growth.  

Cardi B is fed up with the hate Tyla has received online.

During a recent X Spaces session with fans, the Bronx rapper addressed how hard it is to be a celebrity during the social media age and used the South African pop star as an example.

“Look at Tyla,” Cardi began after explaining how she felt body-shamed during one of her pregnancies. “People been dragging the sh– out of Tyla and it’s, like, the girl don’t even f—ing address or talk about nothing.”

She added: “I’m starting to feel that people just don’t like celebrities. It’s like the only way that that people like celebrities [is] if you don’t f—ing say nothing at all. And they beat your energy and they beat your confidence, they beat you to the f—ing ground.”

Cardi then admitted that she grows tired of seeing “thousands of videos of people talking sh– about you and again brought up the online vitriol spewed Tyla’s way” — though, she admitted she didn’t know where the hate stems from.

“To be honest with you, I don’t even know the hate about it because I never really got into the details of what is the real hard-core thing,” she said. “However, all I do know is every single time I scroll down on my TikTok, there’s a video of her and people are talking sh–. And it’s like, goddamn, what do you want her to f—ing do, cut her f—ing veins? Like, enough. Enough. I really think that’s what ya be wanting.”

The online hate Tyla has gotten goes back to a resurfaced TikTok from 2020 when she referred to herself as a “Coloured South African” and her decision to not answer a question about the debates surrounding her ethnicity posed by Charlamagne Tha God on The Breakfast Club, which perhaps made things worse, according to a recent Variety profile.

In that same profile, she told the outlet that the situation she found herself in was confusing. “That [controversy] was really confusing for me,” she admitted. “I understood both sides of the story, but I was left asking, ‘OK, but what do I do now?’ When who you are is challenged, especially when it’s all you’ve ever known, it shakes you. You want to stand your ground, because if you don’t, someone else will try to define it for you.”

She also addressed choosing not to answer Charlamagne’s question during a British Vogue cover story earlier this year, essentially saying that she doesn’t regret not answering it. “Me choosing not to say anything, I’m happy that I didn’t,” she revealed. “I didn’t want to explain my culture and something that is really important to me on a platform that is just going to be purposefully misconstrued. I’ve explained it a lot of times before, but people took that and put words in my mouth. They said a whole bunch of things that I never said and ran with it.”

She then continued by trying to explain the different meaning the word “colored” has in her native South Africa as opposed to its racist roots in the United States and admitted that she experienced a bit of a cultural shock when she came to America.

“If people really searched, they’ll see that in South Africa we had a lot of segregation,” she began. “It was bad for a lot of us. They just classified us. And that just so happens to be the name that the white people called us. They chose to call people that were mixed ‘coloured’. And I’m not gonna lie, it was hard because all my life, obviously I knew ‘I’m Black’ but also knew that ‘I’m coloured’. So, when I went to America and people were like, ‘You can’t say that!’ I was in a position where I was like, ‘Oh, so what do I do? What am I then?’”

In other Cardi B news, she announced earlier this week that she will be releasing a new single from her highly anticipated upcoming album Am I the Drama? on Friday.