Scooter Braun has said that Taylor Swift fans “made the horrible miscalculation that I care” about their anger over him purchasing the singer’s masters and selling them for a profit.
Braun’s company Ithaca Holdings acquired Swift’s back catalogue in 2019 when it purchased her old record label, Big Machine Label Group. Braun sold Swift’s masters to Shamrock Capital for $300 million the following year, prompting huge backlash from her fanbase. Swift herself wrote in a Tumblr post that this was “the worst-case scenario” for her, calling him out for his “incessant, manipulative bullying”
Swift subsequently began a project to re-record songs from her first six albums so she could own her music again. Between 2021 and 2023, Swift released ‘Taylor’s Version’s of her albums ‘Fearless‘ (originally released in 2008), ‘Red‘ (2012), ‘Speak Now‘ (2010) and ‘1989‘ (2014), with the re-recordings cumulating in billions of streams that broke Spotify records.
In May, Swift bought back her masters, giving her control over her entire catalogue for the first time. “I almost stopped thinking it could ever happen, after 20 years of having the carrot dangled and then yanked away,” she wrote. “But that’s all in the past now. All of the music I’ve ever made … now belongs … to me.”
Now, Braun has revisited the situation in a recent podcast appearance, which was recorded before Swift acquired her masters once again.
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“You know, me even talking about this now, there’s gonna be… They’re gonna be yelling and screaming and this, that and the other,” Braun said on a recent episode of Danielle Robay’s Question Everything podcast. “You can’t say anything right, and it is what it is. My response to that is they made the horrible miscalculation that I care. You know, I don’t know those people out there. And if I met them in person and they needed my help, as a stranger, I would help them.”
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He continued: “I think people forget that when you have a fan base that big and 10,000 people are yelling at you, it feels like the world is ending, but that’s less than 1 per cent of a fan base that big. I think most people are dealing with their own problems. I think most people are dealing with their own insecurities the same way I am, the same way every artist and every human being is. And I think it’s just a more productive use of your time to not get stuck in the craziness of celebrity fodder and focus more on being kind to people.”
Despite the situation, Braun went on to argue that “everybody in the end won” because of how successful Swift’s re-recordings ended up being.
“So she did incredibly well and basically had the biggest moment of her career, reinvigorating her career with each [re-recording],” he said. “It was brilliant on her part, but also each time she released one, you saw a spike in the original catalogue. So, funny enough, everyone involved in the saga, from a business standpoint… One, she’s the biggest she’s ever been, the biggest artist of all time. We did really well with the asset. The people who bought the asset did really well because of those spikes. The only thing that I’m sad about is, that’s a great example where all ships can rise and there doesn’t need to be an enemy.”
Braun recently called the backlash he faced “deeply unfair” in an appearance on Steven Bartlett’s podcast The Diary of a CEO.
“When I bought Big Machine, I thought I was going to work with all the artists on Big Machine. [Taylor] and I had only met three or four times. One of the times, it was years earlier, it was really a great engagement. She invited me to her party. We respected each other.”
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“In between that time since I’d seen her last, I started managing Kanye West,” he continued. “I managed Justin Bieber. I knew she didn’t get along with them. This is where my arrogance came in. I had a feeling she probably didn’t like me because I managed them, but I thought once this announcement happened, she’d talk to me, see who I am, and we’d work together. Then this Tumblr comes out, and it says all of this stuff, and I was just shocked.”
On the sale of Swift’s masters, he said: “I couldn’t fix the relationship that I didn’t have, but then I was able to figure out, ‘You know what? We’ll sell it.
“In the world of streaming, the re-records will only help the old catalogue as much as they help the new catalogue. Both will get a bump. I showed how everyone can be a winner here, and I was able to sell the catalogue and – I don’t want to go into too much detail, but it’s now come out very factually that I did offer it [to Swift] … multiple times in that process. They said no, I sold to someone else, washed my hands of it and moved on.”
The dispute was the subject of Max’s two-part documentary, Taylor Swift vs Scooter Braun: Bad Blood last summer, and Braun said later in the year that “it’s time to move on”, while claiming that “a lot of things were misrepresented” in the doc.
He has also expressed regrets about how he handled the situation, saying in 2022: “I learned an important lesson from that. I think a lot of things got lost in translation. I think that when you have a conflict with someone, it’s very hard to resolve it if you’re not willing to have a conversation.”
