Scooter Braun has a message for Swifties, who are still angry with him over the handling of Taylor Swift‘s master recordings from six years ago.
The music executive and former music manager made a recent appearance on Danielle Robay’s Question Everything podcast, where he opened up about the hate he still receives from Swift’s fanbase years after the original sale of her catalog to Braun’s Ithaca Holdings when he acquired her old record label Big Machine Label Group in 2019. The following year, Ithaca sold Swift’s masters to Shamrock Capital for a reported $300 million, which the singer infamously criticized, leading her to re-record her albums.
“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. “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.
“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 percent of a fan base that big,” Braun continued. “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.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Braun said he believes “everybody in the end won,” despite the years-long feud.
“We did very well in that sale because we bought it at a really great price and the value of the masters went up,” Braun said when asked to further explain what he meant. “When I sold it, she had announced she was gonna do re-records. And if you understand music, the value went up for the masters because Spotify and streamers created a longer decay than buying just CDs. People would listen to them more, so there’s a longer decay, but it’s still decaying. But when she re-recorded, all ships rise in a world of streaming. So people were going on and they were A/B-ing them. They were listening in to see how much they sounded like (the originals).”
“So she did incredibly well and basically had the biggest moment of her career, reinvigorating her career with each one. It was brilliant on her part, but also each time she released one, you saw a spike in the original catalog,” he added. “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.”
Robay notes in the episode’s description on YouTube that the interview with Braun was filmed in April, before it was announced in May that Swift had bought back the rights to her first six albums in the deal with Shamrock Capital.
“This was a business deal to them, but I really felt like they saw it for what was to me: My memories and my sweat and my handwriting and my decades of dreams,” Swift said of the deal back in May.
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