Xuenou > Celebrity > Scooter Braun Admitted He Should’ve Done Things Differently Regarding Buying Taylor Swift’s Master Recordings
Scooter Braun Admitted He Should’ve Done Things Differently Regarding Buying Taylor Swift’s Master Recordings
"I can’t put myself in a place of, you know, arrogance to think that someone would just be willing to have a conversation and be excited to work with me."

Scooter Braun Admitted He Should’ve Done Things Differently Regarding Buying Taylor Swift’s Master Recordings

Scott “Scooter” Braun — the big-time talent manager of artists such as Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, and J Balvin — said he regrets how things went down with the Taylor Swift catalog acquisition.

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“I learned an important lesson from [the Big Machine acquisition]. I told myself this time around, everyone is going to participate. Everyone’s going to know,” he said. “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, [Taylor] 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.”

In the letter Scooter is referring to, Taylor made it clear she did not want involvement with Scooter. “For years, I asked, pleaded for a chance to own my work,” she said. “When I left my masters in Scott’s hands, I made peace with the fact that eventually he would sell them. Never in my worst nightmares did I imagine the buyer would be Scooter. Any time Scott Borchetta has heard the words ‘Scooter Braun’ escape my lips, it was when I was either crying or trying not to.”

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But Scooter was optimistic. “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 I think a lot of things got lost in translation,” he said.

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“I think that when you have a conflict with someone, it’s very hard to resolve it if you’re not willing to have a conversation. 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,” Scooter added.

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“And I learned an important lesson from [the Big Machine acquisition]: that I can never make that assumption again. I can’t put myself in a place of, you know, arrogance to think that someone would just be willing to have a conversation and be excited to work with me. I don’t know these people.”

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Scooter has since sold the catalog, and Big Machine was acquired by South Korean music and entertainment group Hybe. “When I did the deal with Hybe, I took 50 million of my own stock that I received, and I gave it to my employees and my artists,” he said. “And I made sure that everyone participated significantly.”

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He added, “So I choose to look at it as a learning lesson, a growing lesson, and I wish everyone involved well. And I’m rooting for everyone to win because I don’t believe in rooting for people to lose.”

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For now, it looks like everyone’s winning, so maybe there will be peace.

Listen to the entire interview here.