On her various platforms on Thursday, Taylor Swift accused the two Scotts—Scott Borchetta, of her former label, Big Machine, and Scott “Scooter” Braun, the new owner of her master recordings—of tying up her back catalog, another development in a grand drama between an artist and her former label. But Braun, for his part, would like to be excluded from this narrative.
“Scooter is frustrated because his name is being dragged in the mud,” an anonymous source told E! News on behalf of Braun. “He doesn’t run Big Machine or have operational control of company. He hasn’t taken part in these negotiations.”
“This fight with Taylor is not something Scooter agrees with,” the source continued, adding that Swift’s also not returning his calls.
According to Swift, Borchetta and Braun refused her request to use her hits in a couple career-retrospective projects, an artist-of-the-decade performance at the 2019 American Music Awards and a Netflix documentary about her life over “the past few years.” She claims she won’t be able to play a medley of her songs from the last decade at the awards show because Big Machine considers the performance a rerecording (she had worked out a deal where she could rerecord her catalog but was contractually obligated to wait until next year). Big Machine released a statement that read, in part, “We do not have the right to keep her from performing live anywhere.”
This saga has packed quite a bit into its year of life. It began in 2018 when she left her label of over a decade, Big Machine, headed up by Borchetta. Big Machine continued to own her back catalog—every album she had done up until, but not including, the 2019 release Lover. Months after the fact, in late June 2019, it was announced that Borchetta would sell the company to Braun for $300 million. Braun would own Swift’s masters, videos, everything. This presented a problem for the musician. Braun had working relationships with a couple people who had antagonized her in the past—namely Kanye West and the music manager‘s original golden goose, Justin Bieber—and she reported that he had participated in the bullying on occasion as well.
Swift cried foul, claiming she learned of the sale as the world did. Borchetta countered her claim with one of his own, alleging that her father, Scott Swift (the final Scott in the story), had known about the sale since he was a Big Machine shareholder and would have been on the call announcing the news. Taylor’s camp disputed this claim, saying that he deliberately didn’t call into the meeting so he wouldn’t be forced to keep anything from his daughter due to the NDA that bound shareholders. Borchetta also claimed that Swift had been given the chance to buy back her masters and declined, choosing to leave Big Machine instead.
Swift confirmed that in a post she wrote on Tumblr but added some context, saying, “For years I asked, pleaded for a chance to own my work. Instead I was given an opportunity to sign back up to Big Machine Records and ‘earn’ one album back at a time, one for every new one I turned in. I walked away because I knew once I signed that contract, Scott Borchetta would sell the label, thereby selling me and my future. I had to make the excruciating choice to leave behind my past. Music I wrote on my bedroom floor and videos I dreamed up and paid for from the money I earned playing in bars, then clubs, then arenas, then stadiums.”