Scooter Braun has reflected on his dispute with Taylor Swift over master recordings, with his comments coming after the singer announced recently that she now owns all of her music
Former talent manager Scooter Braun has reflected on buying Taylor Swift’s former record label six years ago. He’s also discussed the aftermath of the purchase after being publicly criticised by the singer-songwriter.
His new comments come after Taylor, 35, announced last month that she now owns “all of the music” that she’s ever made. She had been releasing re-recorded versions of albums from earlier in her career following a dispute over her back catalogue.
Scooter got the rights to Taylor’s first six albums in 2019 when his company, Ithaca Holdings, bought Big Machine Label Group. Taylor had moved away from the record label, which reportedly owned the rights to her first six albums, the previous year, and it was later announced in 2020 that her master recordings had been sold to investment firm Shamrock Holdings.
When Scooter’s holding company, Ithaca Holdings, purchased Big Machine Label Group, Taylor said in a Tumblr post that she was “sad” and “grossed out”. She also accused the now 43-year-old of being behind “incessant, manipulative bullying”. As reported at the time, Scooter later said: “I don’t do anything with malicious intent. […] I try to do the right thing.”
Now reflecting on the situation, Scooter said on The Diary Of A CEO podcast, in an episode released on Monday: “When I bought Big Machine, I thought I was going to work with all the artists on Big Machine. I thought it was gonna be like an exciting thing.”
He continued: “[Taylor] and I had only met three times, I think, in my life, three or four times. And one of the times, it was years earlier, it was really a great engagement […] we respected each other, we had a great engagement. In between that time, since I’d seen her last, I started managing Kanye West. I managed Justin Bieber. I knew she didn’t get along with them.
“I had a feeling – this is where my arrogance came in – I had a feeling she probably didn’t like me because I managed them. But I thought that once this announcement happened, she would talk to me, see who I am, and we would work together.
“And the announcement came out and I’m calling Scott Borchetta [chief executive of Big Machine Records] and saying, ‘Hey, send me her number […] and I just talked to this person and they’re excited’ […] and then this Tumblr (post) comes out and says all this stuff. And I was just like, shocked.”
Scooter added: “It’s been five, six years, I don’t need to go back into it, but what I can tell you is everything in life is a gift. Having that experience allows me to have empathy for the people I worked with who I’d always say ‘yeah I understand’ but I never knew what it was like to be on the global stage like that.
“I never knew what criticism like that felt like. And like I told you, the biggest gift that I got from that was understanding that all the praise I had received up until that moment was not deserved, and all the hate I got after that moment was not deserved, because none of these people knew me. She didn’t know me. This person didn’t know me.”
In 2019, Taylor announced she would re-record several of her albums in a bid to regain ownership of the masters. A master recording is the original recording of a song, and whoever owns it earns revenue through avenues including streaming and use in TV, film and adverts.
To date, Taylor has released new versions of her previous albums Fearless (2008), Red (2012), Speak Now (2010) and 1989 (2014). Reputation and her self-titled debut, released in 2017 and 2006, are yet to be re-released as Taylor’s Versions.
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