💪 Taylor Swift Buys Back Her Master Recording!

In today’s newsletter I discuss Taylor Swift buying back her masters, actress and singer Hailee Steinfeld and NFL Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen got married over the weekend, Private equity firm Roark Capital acquired a majority stake in Dave's Hot Chicken, Pope Leo XIV gave 5,000 Vatican staff a ~$570 dollar "conclave bonus" for their hard work, Elon Musk's Neuralink, raised $650 million dollars, Robinhood acquires Bitstamp for $200 million dollars, and Travis and Jason Kelce acquire a minority stake in the St. Joseph Goats professional indoor football in The Arena League.

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💪 Taylor Swift Buys Back Her Master Recording!

Taylor Swift announced on May 30, 2025, that she has officially acquired ownership of her entire music catalog. This is big! It means the Grammy Award-winning artist now controls the master recordings of all her past and present music.

The history of Taylor Swift's music catalog has been a contentious one to say the least. Taylor Swift initially signed with Big Machine Records, founded by Scott Borchetta, in 2005. Under this agreement, Big Machine Records owned the master recordings of her first six studio albums. In 2019, Scott Borchetta sold Big Machine Records to Scooter Braun's Ithaca Holdings for approximately $300 million dollars, without letting Taylor Swift make an offer to buy back her own music. This sale included the masters to Taylor Swift's first six albums, a move Taylor Swift publicly condemned, stating she was not given the opportunity to purchase her masters, which she had been trying to do for years. In November 2020, Scooter Braun's Ithaca Holdings sold Taylor Swift's master recordings to Shamrock Holdings for an estimated $300 million dollars. Why did he sell it for roughly the same amount he bought it for? No one knows, but it only further fueled Taylor Swift's determination to regain control of her work.

As a way of saying FU to Scooter Braun, Taylor Swift embarked on a project to re-record all of her albums, calling them "Taylor's Versions". So far Taylor Swift has successfully re-recorded and released four of her six albums. These re-recorded versions have in some cases gone on to have more commercial success than the originals, allowing Taylor Swift to regain artistic and financial control over these works. The financial impact of the re-recordings has been substantial, with industry estimates placing Taylor Swift's earnings from these new versions in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The re-recordings and releases also helped fuel excitement for Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour, which visited five continents, performed 149 shows, and sold more than $2 billion dollars in ticket sales alone, plus revenue from merchandise which brought in $500 million dollars, and the concert film "Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour" which grossed over $261.7 million dollars worldwide. All together Taylor Swift’s tour brought in an estimated $4.1 billion dollars. If reporting is correct, Taylor Swift personally earned around $13 million dollars per show, multiplied by the 149 shows she performed, that would mean she made approximately $1.93 billion dollars from The Eras Tour (before taxes of course).

The announcement that Taylor Swift now owns her entire catalog is a huge victory for her after all she went through in her fight to retake ownership of her masters. Taylor Swift now once again has complete control over her creative legacy and financial future, making her the rare artist that can actually say that.

🐓 Business

Private equity firm Roark Capital has acquired a majority stake in fast-growing restaurant chain Dave's Hot Chicken, in a deal valuing the company at nearly $1 billion dollars. Dave's Hot Chicken, founded in 2017, saw its U.S. systemwide sales surge by 57% in 2024, exceeding $600 million dollars. With this investment, Dave's Hot Chicken CEO Bill Phelps plans to expand the chain to up to 4,000 global locations, proving that if you make enough people sweat enough, they'll eventually come back for more.

💍 Entertainment

On May 31, 2025 actress and singer Hailee Steinfeld married NFL Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen in a ceremony at the Ysidro Ranch in Montecito, California.

Josh Allen is the celebrated starting quarterback for the NFL's Buffalo Bills, known for his powerful arm and loved by all in Buffalo, New York. Hailee Steinfeld is an actress and singer, and friend of Taylor Swift, who is known for her roles in films like "True Grit" and "Bumblebee", and the Disney+ Marvel series "Hawkeye", as well as for her successful music career.

The marriage of Hailee Steinfeld and Josh Allen also shines a spotlight on the growing U.S. wedding industry, which generates around $70.5 billion dollars in revenue annually, and that doesn’t even include how much couples spend on their honeymoon, which is estimated to be an additional $4-$8 billion dollars. With around 2.5 million weddings taking place in the U.S. each year, the wedding industry includes wedding planning, venue rentals, catering, bridal attire, and entertainment.

It seems love, or at least the celebration of it, is a consistently profitable endeavor.

⛪ Religion

File this under “a major religion does the right thing”. Pope Leo XIV has given a "conclave bonus" of €500 (around $569.26 in U.S. dollars) to the approximately 5,000 Vatican staff for their hard work during the recent conclave that saw Robert Francis Prevost become the 267th pope when he took the name Pope Leo XIV.

This gesture of gratitude revives a tradition that was cold heartedly abolished by the previous Pope Francis in 2013, when he instead chose to redirect the monetary gift to papal charities and welfare institutions as a sign of the Church's concern for people in need.

Yes, because taking the bonus of the hard working people of the Vatican, while the conclave was in session to choose the Catholic church’s next pope, just screams “concern for the people”.

🧠 Tech

Elon Musk's neurotechnology company, Neuralink, has successfully raised $650 million in a new funding round. This Series E funding, which includes investments by ARK Invest, DFJ Growth, Founders Fund, G42, Human Capital, Lightspeed, QIA, Sequoia Capital, Thrive Capital, Valor Equity Partners, and Vy Capital, values the company at $9 billion dollars.

Neuralink's technology involves a surgically implanted brain-computer interface, the N1 Implant or "the Link," which uses ultra-thin threads with thousands of electrodes to record and stimulate brain activity, aiming to allow individuals with paralysis to control external devices with their thoughts.

With this funding round Neuralink has enough money in the bank to begin assimilating all human beings on Earth. Resistance is futile.

🪙 Crypto

Robinhood has finalized its $200 million dollar acquisition of Bitstamp, the world's longest-running cryptocurrency exchange, in a deal to expand trading into global and institutional crypto markets. This cash deal, which was first announced in June 2024, brings Bitstamp's over 50 global crypto licenses and its institutional client base to Robinhood. 

I have mixed feelings about this deal, but not because both companies aren’t sound and well run businesses. In fact, I have trading accounts on both Robinhood and Bitstamp. My hesitation is because of Robinhood's controversial role in the 2021 GameStop "meme stock" debacle, where the platform restricted trading of GameStop, leading to thousands of small retail investors being temporarily locked out of the stock while big Wall Street firms were able to continue trading.

Just another case of Wall Street crapping on the little guys.

My fear is Robinhood could pull a similar move with trading of popular cryptocurrency like Solana or XRP. What the crypto markets need now more than ever is serious exchanges embracing cryptocurrency, and I’m just not sure that Robinhood, whose go to market strategy has been to gamify stock trading, is the right company to acquire Bitstamp. But the deal is done, and we’ll just have to see how they handle the continued embrace of cryptocurrency by consumers.

🏈 Sports

Travis and Jason Kelce, two of the most successful players in the NFL, have acquired a minority stake in the St. Joseph Goats, a professional indoor football team in The Arena League, alongside an investment by their beer brand Garage Beer which now owns 1% of the team. Let’s unpack that last part.

Travis and Jason Kelce became part-owners of Ohio-based beer company Garage Beer in June 2024, and announced the news on their podcast "New Heights". Nothing goes together better than beer and football - am I right? So Travis and Jason Kelce’s thinking is let’s merge the two together in an investment that will obviously make them money, because all these two do these days is bring money!

After both Travis and Jason Kelce have won their own Super Bowls, and having last year signed a 3-year, $100 million dollar contract with Amazon’s Wondery for their "New Heights" podcast, it seems they still have too much time on their hands (even though Travis Kelce is jetsetting around the world these days with his girlfriend Taylor Swift and due to arrive at the Kansas City Chiefs pre-season training camp in August), so they’ve decided to buy a stake in an indoor arena football team.

It’s good to know they have backup plans in retirement if the whole podcasting thing doesn’t work out.

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irl Media NEWSLETTER is written, edited, and published by Chris Thompson.