In case anyone's unclear what November 2020 means to TAYLOR SWIFT, her social media offers a good clue: Her most recent INSTAGRAM post was about her endorsement in the US presidential election and her last tweet was a link to a get-out-the-vote video by BON IVER's JUSTIN VERNON (in which he sings through a mask; you can do it, too, if you really want to). But lurking in the background is another way November 2020 could be a season of change for the world's reigning pop star. As of November 1, Swift apparently is free, under her old contract with BIG MACHINE RECORDS, to release new recordings of her first five albums, something she has said she's eager to do as part of her ongoing quest to be in complete control of her work. She said it enough times in the aftermath of SCOOTER BRAUN's purchase of Big Machine 16 months ago to suggest she wasn't just letting off steam. Remaking her old albums would give her a chance to direct fans to recordings that directly benefit her rather than a label whose sale she bitterly opposed; it also would allow her to fully control movie, TV and commercial syncs for her songs. What she didn't know when she first talked about it last year was that a pandemic would keep her off the road for all of 2020. Is there a better time for redoing your life's work than the middle of a pandemic? For all anyone knows, she's already done it, has five albums in the can and is waiting for her moment. Whether such a moment is waiting for her is a matter of some conjecture. ALLEN KOVAC, who manages BLONDIE, who re-recorded an album's worth of greatest hits in 2014, told Rolling Stone last year, "The average re-record does 10 to 20 percent [in revenues] of what the original master does." SQUEEZE singer GLENN TILBROOK painted a worse picture for the magazine. A decade after releasing an album of re-recorded hits called SPOT THE DIFFERENCE, he said, "we’ve not had a single uptake" from a music supervisor. But those bands were past their heydays and neither has anywhere near the fanbase Swift currently has, nor the same ability to reach them. A pop star re-recording work that's less than a decade old and still enormously popular is a much less tested proposition. In 2018, JOJO remade two albums she had originally recorded for BLACKGROUND RECORDS, but the label had long kept the originals out of print, so she wasn't competing with herself. "My intention," JoJo wrote in Billboard (paywall), "was to give the fans the nostalgia that they couldn't get." Swift's intention has little to do with nostalgia. It would be more about controlling her career and her work, which makes her part of a more consequential trend—artists declaring their free agency. "The balance of power between labels and artists is tilting toward musicians," the Wall Street Journal's NEIL SHAH writes (paywall) in a piece about YO GOTTI, who's completed his deal with EPIC RECORDS, and TRAVIS SCOTT and KENDRICK LAMAR, who each owe their labels one more album. "The business," says DAVID STROMBERG, general manger of Scott's own CACTUS JACK label, "has changed"... Music publishing, strangely, seems to be moving in the opposite direction, with songwriters tripping over each other to sell their rights in their own work to companies like HIPGNOSIS, which is handing out millions of dollars like SPOTIFY hands out pennies. Hipgnosis' newest acquisition is 42 catalogs containing more than 33,000 songs from KOBALT MUSIC COPYRIGHTS, including pieces of MARIAH CAREY's "ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS YOU," JUSTIN BIEBER's "SORRY" and the FROZEN hit "LET IT GO." The price: $332.9 million... DON'T ROCK THE INBOX is a great new country newsletter from NATALIE WEINER and MARISSA R. MOSS... Techno is officially music and DJs are officially musicians in Germany, where those designations have financial consequences... The title sequences, including some classic theme songs, from all of the late SEAN CONNERY's JAMES BOND films, courtesy JAZZWAX's MARC MYERS... RIP gospel great BISHOP RANCE ALLEN, JAMES BROAD and NIKKI MCKIBBIN.