Scooter Braun on Taylor Swift Fans: “They Made the Horrible Miscalculation That I Care”

13 hours ago 2



Music executive Scooter Braun has a response for Taylor Swift fans still angry that he purchased the master recordings of her music catalog and sold them for a profit. He simply doesn’t care.

“You know, me even talking about this now, there’s gonna be… They’re gonna be yelling and screaming and this, that and the other,” Braun said on a recent episode of Danielle Robay’s Question Everything podcast. “You can’t say anything right, and it is what it is. 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.”

He continued, “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 problems. 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.”

In 2019, Braun’s company, Ithaca Holdings, acquired Swift’s back catalog as part of its purchase of her old record label, Big Machine Label Group. The following year, Braun sold Swift’s masters to Shamrock Capital for $300 million. When Swift let her displeasure be known about how her music had been handled, legions of Swifties united in branding Braun as Public Enemy No. 1.

Swift responded by re-recording her previous albums, which her fans snapped up in droves. Six years later, and many members of Swift’s fanbase have yet to forgive Braun for the way he handled the situation.

According to Braun, however, “everybody in the end won,” regardless of the bad blood generated by the drama.

“So she did incredibly well and basically had the biggest moment of her career, reinvigorating her career with each [re-recording],” he said. “It was brilliant on her part, but also each time she released one, you saw a spike in the original catalog. 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.”

Watch the full podcast via YouTube below. The relevant segment begins around the 46-minute mark.

In the episode’s YouTube description, Robay noted that it was recorded in April of this year, before Swift regained control of those original master recordings from Shamrock Capital for somewhere around $360 million.

Read Entire Article