Scooter Braun Regrets How He Handled Acquiring Taylor Swift's Catalogue

As originally published by Sydney Brasil on Exclaim!

Now that he's offloaded Taylor Swift's original masters in an over $1 billion deal, Scooter Braun has expressed that he wishes he handled the acquisition of her first six albums differently. 

In an interview with NPR on podcast The Limits with Jay Williams, he was asked if he would have dealt with the Swift situation in a different way had it happened now. "Yes, I would have. I learned an important lesson from that."

He then said, "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."

He continued:

I think in any conflict, you can say, I didn't do anything. It's their fault. And you could be right. You could be justified. And you could say, this is unfair, I'm being treated unfairly, or you can say, okay, I'm being treated unfairly. I don't like how this is feeling. I can't fix this, so how am I going to look at it and learn from it? And I didn't appreciate how that all went down. I thought it was unfair. But I also understand, from the other side, they probably felt it was unfair, too. 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.

Braun gained ownership of Swift's masters after he acquired Big Machine Label Group in 2019. She has been vocally distraught over the lack of control she has over her own recordings, and has been re-recording her first six albums since 2020 in retaliation. So far, she has released reworkings of Fearless and Red.

After selling his stakes in Big Machine to South Korean media conglomerate Hybe (f.k.a. Big Hit Entertainment) in 2021, Swift released a lengthy statement saying she was never offered the chance to buy her masters back. 

In order to focus on her re-recordings, Swift declined to perform at the Super Bowl's halftime show, which has since gone to Rihanna. Swift is also releasing her 10th studio album, Midnights, on October 21.

Watch Braun's interview with NPR below.