Music
Scooter Braun has revealed his “regrets” over his purchase of Taylor Swift’s catalogue.
It’s one of this era’s defining moments: Scooter Braun swooped to purchase the rights to Taylor Swift’s catalogue, after he acquired her former home Big Machine Label Group.
At the time, Taylor Swift labelled it “the worst case scenario” and promptly became an ambitious, exhaustive project – re-recording her catalogue from scratch, in order to obtain ownership of those (new) recordings.
Scooter Braun has now offered his insights into the tangle, taking part in a lengthy interview for The Limits With Jay Williams.
The host asks the entrepreneur if – with the benefit of hindsight – he would liked to have handled the situation better; “Yes, I would have. I learned an important lesson from that,” responds the music CEO.
“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, OK, 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.
Find the full interview on NPR.
Taylor Swift’s new album ‘Midnights’ will be released on October 21st.
