Last week, new Taylor Swift music appeared on streaming services, an event that typically comes with much fanfare. Live From Clear Channel Stripped 2008, a recording of a radio performance, captures an 18-year-old Swift around the release of Fearless, the record that guided her transition from country underdog to girl-next-door pop star. This time, rather than participate in an elaborate marketing campaign, Swift marked the release by encouraging her fans not to listen to it. “I’m always honest with you guys about this stuff so I just wanted to tell you that this release is not approved by me,” she wrote in a note to fans on social media.

In Live From Clear Channel’s renditions of songs like “Love Story” and “Fearless,” Swift’s accounts of the messy highs and lows of young adulthood feel profoundly sincere. But enjoying these performances today is complicated by the nature of their release. Live From Clear Channel is the first archival material to be released by Big Machine since powerhouse music manager Scooter Braun purchased the label and its assets, including the master rights to Swift’s first six albums, last year. Amid an ongoing public battle between Swift and her former label, it serves as a concrete sign that her past work is out of her control, and sets a precedent for future unauthorized releases to come. In her warning note last week, Swift chastised the “greed” of Braun and his investors “in the time of Coronavirus.”

In a June 2019 Tumblr post, Swift explained that Braun owning the rights to her music was her “worst case scenario.” “My musical legacy is about to lie in the hands of someone who tried to dismantle it,” she wrote, alluding to Braun’s “bullying” role in her public feud with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian. The situation deteriorated further when Swift accused Braun and former Big Machine boss Scott Borchetta of preventing her from performing her older material in her 2019 American Music Awards performance and using it in her 2020 Netflix documentary, Miss Americana, which Borchetta and Braun denied. (Both the performance and the documentary ultimately included old songs.)

The debate over an artist’s right to own their music is not new. “If you don’t own your masters, your master owns you,” Prince, no stranger to the difficulties of owning his work, told Rolling Stone in 1996. But Braun’s control over Swift’s masters feels particularly suffocating, given her bitter personal history with him and her career-long struggle to control the story of her own music and public persona. The release of archival material may be fair game under the terms of a contract Swift signed when she was 15 years old, but there’s still something unsavory about a boardroom of older men cashing in on the naivete of a teenager whose adult self is desperately fighting against it.

Since parting with Big Machine in 2018, Swift seems intent on demonstrating her growth. Miss Americana and 2019 album Lover both played like public reckonings with a past self. Whether or not you believe her, there’s no disputing that she is trying to make her voice heard in a newly representative way, which in part means trading the safety of doe-eyed naivete for the occassional discomforts of being outspoken—be that via her one-dollar sexual assault lawsuit, support of LGBTQ rights, or newfound political voice. While her approach can sometimes come off as heavy-handed or opportunistic, watching her budding self-determination be crushed in this way—by the trotting out of a younger, more compliant version of her, just as she seems to be cutting her own path—is genuinely upsetting.