Scooter Braun Opens Up About Taylor Swift’s Messy Battle Against The Masters Again In Interview With NPR Limits with Jay Williams, in which the manager/entrepreneur said that if he had to do it again, he would definitely choose another path. “Yeah, I would have,” Braun said when asked if, looking back, he would have handled things any other way.
“I learned an important lesson from that,” he explained, noting that when he recently sold his business to BTS’ parent company HYBE, he was determined to get everyone involved involved and involved. take an appropriate share, even if they were not working. more for him. “When I made the deal you talk about with [Swift’s former label home] Big Machine, I was under a very strict NDA with the gentleman who owned it, and I couldn’t tell any artist,” he said of the 2019 deal in which he acquired the Big Machine. Scott Borchetta’s Label Group Records and Swift’s catalog for $300 million. ; Braun then sold Swift’s Masters in 2020, prompting Swift to begin the process of re-recording her first six Big Machine albums.
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After the Big Machine deal struck by Braun — who manages Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande, among others — his Ithaca Holdings turned around and sold the Big Machine catalog to Shamrock Holdings, marking the second time in 17 months that ownership of the six Swift’s early albums changed. hands.
Braun said he was not legally allowed to speak to any of the artists on the label when negotiating the deal and that he told Borchetta that “if any of the artists want to come back and join this, you must let me know. .” He again referenced a letter Borchetta later shared in public in which Swift — who Braun never refers to by name in the interview — allegedly said she didn’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,” Braun told Williams.
At the time of the first deal with Big Machine, Swift lashed out at the sale to Braun, writing in a Tumblr post that she said she learned of the pact “as it was announced to the world”; a source in Swift’s camp said at the time that they knew about the acquisition several days in advance.
She wrote that the news immediately brought her back to “the relentless and manipulative bullying I suffered at [Braun’s] hands for years. Like when Kim Kardashian orchestrated a snippet of an illegally recorded phone call to be leaked, and then Scooter got her two clients together to bully me online about it. Or when his client, Kanye West, hosted a revenge porn clip that strips me naked. Now Scooter has stripped me of my life’s work, which I haven’t had the opportunity to buy. Essentially, my musical legacy is about to end up in the hands of someone who tried to dismantle it.
She called the acquisition her “worst case scenario”, saying Borchetta was well aware of her feelings about Braun.
For his part, Braun told Williams he was “excited” to work with all of the Big Machine artists and that when the deal was finalized he began making calls to let interested parties know that he was part of it. “And before I could even do that, I made four phone calls…everything just went wild,” he said, without specifying who the four calls were to. “So I think a lot of things got lost in translation. I think when you have a conflict with someone, it’s very hard to resolve it if you’re not willing to have a conversation. 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.
Braun said the “important lesson” he learned from this imbroglio is that he can “never make that assumption again.” I can’t put myself in a position of arrogance to think that someone would just be willing to have a conversation and be happy to work with me. I don’t know these people. This explains why he said that when he made the deal to sell Ithaca Holdings to HYBE in April 2021, he took “50 million of my own shares…and I gave them to my employees and to my artists.
Because it’s a publicly traded company, its efforts have been reported, and Braun said he’s happy to talk now about how “everyone has participated in a meaningful way,” even alumni. employees, noting that he called shareholders, including longtime Bieber collaborator Poo Bear, as well as Bieber, Grande, Demi Lovato and J. Balvin to inform them of the HYBE deal.
“And everyone felt good, you know, and they could sell the stocks if they wanted to. It’s worth real money. But I wanted them to feel good because I learned that lesson” , said Braun. “So I chose to look at it as a lesson in learning, a lesson in growth, and I wish good luck to everyone involved. And I encourage everyone to win because I don’t believe in rooting for people to lose.
Watch Braun’s interview below.
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