In his most extensive public comments to date on the saga of Taylor Swift‘s master recordings — and what he says he hopes will be one of the last times he addresses it — music mogul Scooter Braun makes the claim that things worked out better than imaginable for all of the parties involved. “The cool part is, if you actually pay attention, everybody in the end won,” Braun says.
Braun’s interview with Danielle Robay for her “Question Everything” podcast runs 90 minutes, fewer than 20 of which are devoted to his now nearly mythical run-in from afar with Swift. Still, it represents perhaps the best window to date into the former manager’s thinking about how he believes he’s been publicly perceived since he bought and then resold the pop superstar’s masters, and his insistence that this change in his public approval ratings did not affect him personally to any great degree — only his divorce did.
Speaking of which, Robay also asks Braun to address the rumors that Swift’s song “Vigilante Shit” is about him and his former spouse, Yael Cohen Braun. He maintains that it isn’t related to them, and that he and his ex-wife remain tightly bonded and “laugh about that stuff” — although Braun calls the song and the speculation over it “a great strategy move.”
At one point, Braun breaks the fourth wall to say “hello” to the viewers he knows are watching the podcast looking for further fodder for their fire. “You know, me even talking about this now, there’s gonna be… Hello, Swifties! They’re gonna be yelling and screaming and this, that and the other. You can’t say anything right, and it is what it is. You know, my response to that is they made the horrible miscalculation that I care. You know, I don’t know those people out there. And if I met them in person and they needed my help as a stranger, I would help them… And I think people forget that when you have a fan base that big and 10,000 people are yelling at you, it feels like the world is ending, but that’s less than 1% of a fan base that big. I think most people are dealing with their own insecurities the same way I am, the same way every artist and every human being is. And I think it’s just a more productive use of your time to not get stuck in the craziness of celebrity fodder and focus more on being kind to people.””
The discussion of the Swift contretemps begins about 45 minutes into the podcast, with Braun telling Robay that he knows it’s her job to ask those questions, as reluctant as he is to dig back into one of the enduring show-biz battles of the modern era.
“Look, for me, it was six years ago. I think like going backwards and revisiting this is a waste of time,” he says, nonetheless reiterating his point of view on where things went wrong. “When Taylor says that she wasn’t offered the masters, the reason I was under NDA was because we were in negotiations to sell it back to her. I just choose to believe her, that maybe they didn’t tell her… maybe her team didn’t tell her, didn’t understand the negotiations.”
Braun continues, “The only thing that I really regret is that it’s easy to have a monster if you never meet them. And Taylor and I have only met three times in our life, and I think at that point, we hadn’t seen each other in two, three years. I was managing people she wasn’t a fan of” — referring to Justin Bieber and Kanye West — “and she probably saw my name come up and was like, ‘I don’t like those people, so I don’t like him.’ But we never had an opportunity to sit in front of each other and actually have a conversation to this day. And I think that most of the time when people actually sit in front of each other, the monster isn’t real, that there’s an understanding, that there’s a healing, (if) people can have a conversation. And because when I was asking for that, it just never happened, it really went awry, and I chose to not say much.
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“But the cool part is, if you actually pay attention, everybody in the end won,” he adds.
Robay asks what he means, and Braun elaborates. “Well, yes, she could have bought them back and that could have been part of the victory, but I choose to think her team maybe didn’t tell her. But when they turned it down, we ended up selling it to someone else, because she didn’t want us to have it. We did very well in that sale because we bought it at a really great price and the value of the masters went up. And when I sold it, she had announced she was gonna do re-records. And if you understand music, the value went up for the masters because Spotify and streamers created a longer decay than buying just CDs. People would listen to them more, so there’s a longer decay, but it’s still decaying. But when she rerecorded, all ships rise in a world of streaming. So people were going on and they were A/B-ing them. They were listening in to see how much they sounded like (the originals). So she did incredibly well and basically had the biggest moment of her career, reinvigorating her career with each one. It was brilliant on her part, but also each time she released one, you saw a spike in the original catalog. And that’s how we were able to tell, OK, if she doesn’t want them, this is still a really great asset.
“And we actually created an earn-out. We hit every one of our earn-outs, and we were right. So, funny enough, everyone involved in the saga, from a business standpoint… One, she’s the biggest she’s ever been — the biggest artist of all time. We did really well with the asset. The people who bought the asset did really well because of those spikes. The only thing that I’m sad about is, that’s a great example where all ships can rise and there doesn’t need to be an enemy.”
Robay notes in the YouTube info for the podcast that the interview was conducted in April, well before Swift announced on May 30 that she had bought back her master recordings from Shamrock Holdings, which had purchased them from Braun’s company in 2020.
Braun’s position that Swift passed on an opportunity to buy her masters before they were sold to Shamrock has, of course, been at odds with the account offered by the singer and her team, who maintained that the singer dropped out of negotiations due to a demand for NDAs, only to feel broadsided when the sale to Shamrock was announced — much as she said she had felt sandbagged when her former label, Big Machine, was first sold to Braun’s company the year before. Braun’s camp has always insisted they took Swift pulling away from negotiations as a sign she had lost interest in making a deal, maintaining the NDA stipulations her team objected to were malleable — a stark difference in accounts that, at this late date, is unlikely ever to be reconciled.
Robay quotes the “Vigilante Shit” lyrics from Swift’s “Midnights” album to Braun and asks if he believes they’re about him and his divorce. (Swift herself has never publicly addressed whether the song is based for her in fact, fiction or something in-between.)
“No, because I talk to Yael every day,” Braun responds. “My ex-wife is one of my best friends, so me and my ex-wife laugh about that stuff. We don’t even call each other ‘ex.’ That’s my partner, you know? That’s the mother of my children. That is my family for life. I have a tattoo on my finger that’s ‘the same team’ after my divorce, because she and I are same team for life. That’s what we say to each other. So no, I never thought that was about us, she never thought it was about us, and everyone else was kind of feeding into the fire. Great strategy move, but, like, nah.”
Braun also frankly discusses a moment of suicidal ideation he experienced five years ago, although he says it had nothing to do with the Swift controversy.
“No one in my family had ever been divorced, and at that time I had built up this foundation of Scooter because I didn’t think Scott was strong enough,” he says. “So having the perfect career, the perfect wife, the perfect life, the kids, the success, I thought that made me worthy of love. And it wasn’t until our marriage came apart and I couldn’t fix it that I felt like a failure, because I didn’t have a foundation. But it was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. Because the ups and downs of artist life, the Taylor stuff, none of that actually affected me — losing my marriage affected me. The idea of not being with my kids 50% of the time deeply affected me, so much so that in October 2020, when I didn’t really even understand what was going on, I had a suicidal thought at the height of my career, for 20 minutes. Because of my marriage falling apart. No one really knew (about the split). I knew, I couldn’t understand why, and I was like, man, if I can’t be the father to them… I felt like I didn’t want to be there. And after that 20 minutes went by, I was like, ‘What the hell was that? That was really scary. I never wanna feel like that ever again.’
“And then the next day, I actually opened up to a friend, and he got recommended Hoffman. And Oct. 26, I went into the Hoffman Process and started healing and got to this beautiful place where here I am six years later. Before, I’d never been divorced, no one ever said anything negative about me in the press, everything online was very beautiful (and) there’s nothing negative. Six years later, I’m divorced, people talk shit about me constantly — and I couldn’t be happier. I wouldn’t trade it in a million years. The relationship I have with my children, the relationship I have with my friends… Do you wish certain things didn’t happen because they were painful? Absolutely. But they were so necessary.
“When I finally had to slow down because I couldn’t control it anymore, I broke. I had no foundation. And that’s when I had to put myself back together, and other people helped me. And Hoffman didn’t fix me, but it started fixing me, and it started me on a journey to study breath work and study meditation and do therapy and study stoicism and Kabbalah and study all these different things that I’m still doing every single day today.”
Asked by Robay, “What do you want moving forward?,” Braun half-teasingly responds, “Oh, I want people to stop asking me about past dramas,” before moving on to a more reflective answer.
The Swift saga is not the only part of his life Braun is putting behind him. He has gotten out of the management business, and he makes it clear there’s no going back on that for him.
“Is there an artist you wish you had managed?” she asks. “I don’t ever want to manage again,” he declares. She comes back: “But in the past, was there ever someone that you really wanted on your roster that you never got?” He’s so over management, he declines to consider it even as a theoretical.
“No. I had a great run. That’s my answer to the question. I don’t have that wish anymore. I had an incredible management career. I’m good. And I think everyone was with the person they’re supposed to be with, yeah. Peace, love and happy endings.”
From Variety US