Music mogul Scooter Braun has just appeared on Stephen Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO podcast to express his shock at his Taylor Swift spat, and claim that he’d assumed that Swift would be able to work with him following his purchase of the rights to her first six albums.
And he’s also given a little further insight into the the misty world of his purchase in the first place.
The deal – which saw Braun taking ownership of Swift’s legacy and profiting from it – would see Swift complaining on Tumblr that: “Scooter has stripped me of my life’s work, that I wasn’t given an opportunity to buy. Essentially, my musical legacy is about to lie in the hands of someone who tried to dismantle it.”
Now, in the new podcast Braun explains that: “I had a feeling – this is where my arrogance came in – she probably didn’t like me because [of who I managed]. But I thought that once this announcement happened, she would talk to me, see who I am, and we would work together.
“And then this Tumblr comes out and says all this stuff. And I was just, like, shocked.”
Swift retribution
So how did such a painful and high profile beef explode into the mainstream consciousness anyway?
While it’s hard not to feel sorry for the wronged Swift – who frames her side as the simple, unfair, ‘theft’ of her legacy – there are clearly two sides to this story.
Rather than enacting an evil revenge on Swift, it’s possible that Braun simply saw an investment opportunity and blindly went for it, not expecting any kind of backlash.
“When I bought Big Machine, I thought I was going to work with all the artists on Big Machine. I thought it was going to be an exciting thing.” he tells the podcast, seemingly fully expecting Swift to remain with the label, and continue recording new material there.
Indeed, the deal structured by Big Machine’s former owner, Scott Borchetta, would see Braun take on the entire label, not just Swift’s older rights, and envisioned Swift staying with the label and – unbelievably, in hindsight – continuing to earn money for Braun.
At the time, Big Machine was also home to Rascal Flatts, Lady Antebellum, Jennifer Nettles and Cheap Trick, amongst others.
Signing a sweet deal
To maintain Swift’s interest in sticking around, Borchetta had – according to Swift – crafted a scheme where new recordings would allow Swift to ‘earn back’ each of her past masters upon receipt of the next album. Thus – in the ideal world that Braun signed up to – Braun would not only own all of Swift’s music and profit from it, but own her future music, too. An enticing package that was worth far more to Braun than Borchetta could ever earn by simply selling Swift the rights to her back catalogue.
Thus the notion of selling the Swift package as a going concern to Braun seems like a smart business decision.
It’s also worth saying that Borchetta maintains that his deal with Braun would have seen Swift being given the rights in exchange for simply signing up to stay around.
However, one glaring fact seems to have escaped both Borchetta and Braun. With Braun becoming Kanye West’s manager somewhere along the way – an artist Swift has an ongoing and passionate feud with following his rude 2009 MTV Video Music Awards interruption and claim that he “made that bitch famous” – the notion that Swift would then fall in line and start earning Braun money with new recordings (while he would endlessly profit from her older ones) does seem more than a little ridiculous.
“In between that time, since I’d seen her last, I started managing Kanye West, I managed Justin Bieber. I knew she didn’t get along with them,” Braun now admits.
And the fact that Swift’s revenge masterwork – choosing to re-record all her albums, replacing the originals and telling all her fans to listen to them instead – never even crossed Borchetta or Braun’s mind, is perhaps most ridiculous of all.
Look what you made me do.
Money for nothing
Ultimately, the most impressive aspect of this whole affair seems to have been Braun’s ability to – just one year and five months later – sell Swift’s rights to Shamrock Capital for (an estimated) $405 million. That’s (an estimated) $70 million profit for something with a future value that was conceivably only ever going to go down.
That they then simply flipped them to Swift (the only person who could realistically possibly want to buy them) for approximately the same value still has industry watchers scratching their heads.
Maybe they weren’t aware of the impact of Taylor’s Versions? Or maybe – like some fans – they just think that they’re not as good…
Either way, Swift taking on what was arguably rightfully hers after all is all looking like a double-win for her as she now gets to earn from both the original AND her re-recordings.
In fact, 2017’s Reputation – an album that’s yet to see a Taylor’s Version re-release (though a single track was teased as part of an episode of The Handmaid’s Tale recently) – just leapt 73 places on the Billboard 200, reaching number five and scoring another 42,000 album-equivalent units.
Free from its ‘Taylor doesn’t like it’ fan purgatory it’s clear that they’re lapping up the hit album all over again, with it performing as well now as during its 2018 highs.
Likewise the rest of her original catalogue is seeing huge lifts now that it’s official Swift-endorsed product once more, both reaffirming the level of support and love her fans have for the star, and perhaps underscoring that (whisper it) they preferred the old versions too…
As for whether Braun thinks that the whole episode was worth the hassle (and the approximately $70 million he made in the flip to Shamrock) he’s still remaining both tight-lipped and upbeat.
However it can be argued that he’ll have to nurture a few more Justin Bieber/Ariana Grande-level stars for his reputation (no pun intended) to reverse and his spat with Swift to cease becoming his legacy.
