Scooter Braun Regrets Starting Feud With Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift’s former music label Big Machine Records sold her music catalog without her permission. Scooter Braun who purchased her masters has been in hot water with Swifties ever since 2018. This was primarily the reason behind his feud with the pop artist. Braun recently admitted that he regrets his decision.

Braun appeared on the NPR podcast, The Limits with Jay Williams, this week and spoke about the controversial topic of purchasing rights to Swift’s music. When he purchased Big Machine Records from Scott Borchetta, his deal included Swift’s first six albums up through 2017’s “Reputation.” 

During the conversation with Williams, the 41-year-old music manager stated that the purchase ended up teaching him an important lesson. He also pointed out he was under a very strict non-disclosure agreement the label’s former owner.

I learned an important lesson from the purchase. When I did that deal, I was under a very strict NDA with the gentleman who owned it, and I couldn’t tell any artist. I wasn’t allowed to. I wasn’t legally allowed to.

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What I told him was, hey, if any of the artists want to come back and buy into this, you have to let me know. And he shared a letter with me that’s out there publicly that – you know, the artist you’re referring to said, ‘I don’t want to participate in my masters. I’ve decided to, you know, not make this deal,’ blah, blah, blah. So that was the idea I was under.

Braun mentioned he wasn’t being realistic when signing the deal and it wasn’t long before all hell broke loose. He was excited to work with every artist on the label but they were not eager to work with him.

I was excited to work with every artist on the label. So when we finalized the deal, I started making phone calls to say, hey, I’m a part of this. And before I could even do that – I made four phone calls; I started to do those phone calls – all hell broke loose.

So the regret I have there is that I made the assumption 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 be in business together. And I made that assumption with people that I didn’t know.

Swift had attempted, unsuccessfully, to acquire the rights herself and was outraged, by being blindsided by the deal. This ended up Swift launching a global campaign to protect artists’ rights and changed the entire music industry landscape forever.

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