Scooter Braun has been in a very public feud with Taylor Swift for several years, and he’s ready to tell his side of the story.
The record executive recently sat down with NPR for a new interview, and he opened up about the feud that still rocks many Swift fans to this day.
In case you escaped all the drama, Braun’s company acquired Swift’s former label, Big Machine Records in 2019. As a result, the record executive then owned the rights to Swift’s first six albums. After the news broke, Swift responded by saying he had been “harassing” her for years.
While chatting with NPR, Braun was asked if he would handle the acquisition differently if he could go back in time. And he recognized that there was something he would change if he could.
“Yes, I would have. I learned an important lesson from that,” the 41-year-old said.
In his interview, Braun explained that he was under a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) while negotiating with Big Machine Records, and said it affected what he could say about the deal before it was done. .
While interacting with the owner of the record agency, Braun claims to have learned that Swift was not interested in her masters.
“What I told him was if any of the artists want to come back and join this, you have to let me know. And he shared with me a letter that’s there publicly – you know, the artist you’re referring to said, I don’t want to participate in my masters. I decided, you know, not to do this deal, blah, blah, blah. So that was the idea I had,” he said.
According to Swift, however, she wanted to acquire the rights from her masters. However, Big Machine said they could only do that by staying with their agency and slowly getting the rights to every album with every new album they recorded from there. Eventually, she turned down that offer and left for a new record agency.
Braun claims he was “excited to work with all of the artists on the label” and started making phone calls after the deal was made to tell artists he was a part of it.
“And before I could even do that – I made four phone calls; I started making these phone calls – it all went wild. So 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,” he said.
Braun went on to describe the one thing he regrets about the whole situation.
“So the regret I have there is that I assumed that everyone, once the deal was done, was going to have a conversation with me, see my intent, see my character and say, great, let’s do business together. And I made that assumption with people I didn’t know,” he said.
Rather than buy into the conflict, Braun chooses to focus on the future.
“What I’m going to do is I’m going to learn from it. I’m going to move on,” he said.
In 2020, Braun sold the masters rights to Swift and Swift got to work re-recording her original albums. In 2021, she announced that she would be focusing her attention on revamping her second album, “Fearless,” first. Then came his album “Red”.
In August 2022, the singer also announced that she will be releasing her latest album, a new work titled “Midnights” in October.
