After a six-year battle with Scott Borchetta, Scooter Braun, Big Machine Label Group, and Shamrock Holdings to repurchase her music, Taylor Swift officially owns all her masters (as well as the Taylor’s Version albums she’s dropped over the years). While the Grammy winner has been vocal about the saga since 2019, Scooter Braun is now sharing his side of the story.
During a recent appearance on the Diary of a CEO podcast, Scooter—who is known for once managing artists like Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, and Demi Lovato—got candid about his drama with Taylor and where he stands with it now.
When his company, Ithaca Holdings, purchased Big Machine Label Group in 2019, Scooter shared that he was “excited” to have the opportunity to work with Taylor, whom he had met less than a handful of times.
“I thought I was going to work with all the artists on Big Machine. I thought it was gonna be an exciting thing. I knew that Taylor—she and I had only met three times, I think in my life...three or four times—one of the times, it was years earlier, it was really a great engagement,” he explained.
“In between that time since I’d seen her last, I started managing Kanye West. I managed Justin Bieber,” he added. “I knew she didn’t get along with them. I had a feeling—this is where my arrogance came in—I had a feeling she probably didn’t like me because I managed them. But I thought that once this announcement happened, she would talk to me, see who I am, and we would work together.”
Scooter revealed that he asked the former owner of Big Machine Label Group, Scott Borchetta, for Taylor’s number when they made the deal. As he made his way through the label’s roster and called artists to connect with them, Taylor published a letter on Tumblr explaining that she hadn’t been given a chance to repurchase her masters.
“I was just shocked,” Scooter shared. “I don’t need to go back into it, but what I can tell you is everything in life is a gift. Having that experience allows me to have empathy for the people I worked with who I would always say, ‘Yeah, I understand.’ But I never knew what it was like to be on the global stage like that. I never knew what criticism like that felt like.”
He added, “All the praise I had received up until that moment was not deserved. All the hate I got after that moment was not deserved, because none of these people knew me. The gift of pain was awareness.”
As for where he stands with Taylor now? He claims he doesn’t “hold any hatred” for the pop culture icon. “Everyone moves on,” he said. “I choose to see it as a gift. I choose to see it as being able to have a perspective that very few people in the world have of knowing what that’s like. Of feeling that on a global level.”
Scooter’s bombshell interview comes after Taylor revealed she bought her masters back with an emotional letter published on her website.
“To say this is my greatest dream come true is actually being pretty casual about it,” she wrote, in part. “To my fans, you know how important this has been to me—so much so that I meticulously re-recorded and released four albums, calling them Taylor’s Versions. The passionate support you showed those albums and the success you found giving The Eras Tour into why I was able to buy back my music. I can’t thank you enough for helping to reunite me with this art that I have dedicated my life to, but never owned until now. All I’ve ever wanted was the opportunity to work hard enough to be able to one day purchase my music outright.”
