Scooter Braun Talks Taylor Swift Feud & His Portrayal In Recent Documentary
Scooter Braun, the music executive who bought Taylor Swift’s old record label with rights to her masters, then sold them, said he wishes people would turn the page on his years-long feud with the pop superstar, so bitter it was the subject of a new two-part Max documentary this summer Taylor Swift vs Scooter Braun: Bad Blood.
“I watched it recently,” Braun, the former music manager and current CEO of HYBE America, said at the Bloomberg Screentime event Thursday in Los Angeles. “I wasn’t going to watch it because I just thought it was going to be, like, another hit piece. And I pretty much stayed quiet about this kind of stuff. And my dad called me and my mom, and they were like, we just watched it. We think you should watch it. So I did.”
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The bad blood started in 2019 when Braun’s Ithaca Holdings acquired Scott Borchetta’s music label Big Machine, whose assets included the master rights to Swift’s first six albums. Swift said she wasn’t notified before the sale and thus escalated a row over the music. Swift had been with Big Machine through 2018 when her contract ended and she moved to Universal.
In 2020, Braun sold the masters to private equity firm Shamrock Capital. “This was the second time my music had been sold without my knowledge,” the singer wrote in a letter to fans posted on X (formerly Twitter).
“A few weeks ago my team received a letter from a private equity company called Shamrock that they had bought 100% of my music, videos and album art from Scooter Braun.”
“The letter told me that they wanted to reach out before the sale to let me know but that Scooter Braun had required that they make no contact with me or my team or the deal would be off.”
She rerecorded the music and rereleased the albums as Taylor’s Version.
“Look, it’s five years later. I think, everyone, it’s time to move on,” Braun said today, claiming there were “a lot of things that were misrepresented” in the doc.
“I think that it’s important in any kind of conflict that people actually communicate directly with each other. I think doing it out on social media and in front of the whole world is not the place. And I think when people actually take the time to stand in front of each other have a conversation, they usually find out the monster’s not real, and that hasn’t happened. And that has not happened.”
The comments followed a total endorsement of Swift. Asked what artist he would pick to build a new company around, if he was to start one today in management or otherwise, he said, “I’m going to give you the soundbite you’re looking for, because I just can’t help myself. The PR team is going to be like, ‘What?’ I think the artist that’s one that you should always bet on, and is already a huge star, and you can always bet on because they want it all the time, and they do what it takes to be, you know, present all the time. is Taylor Swift.”
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