![]() ![]() Swift’s biggest complaint against Braun is rooted in his association with her sworn enemies, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian West. And Borchetta is a traitor for selling them to Braun behind her back without giving Swift a fair opportunity to buy her old masters for herself. Swift’s accusations are twofold: Braun, she says, is a bully, and now he owns her master recordings. Swift is arguing that Braun has bullied her and Borchetta has betrayed her The masters for her old material, as in all the music she made prior to 2018, were still at Big Machine Label Group, where they could be acquired by Scooter Braun. But that deal only applied to her new material, starting with this year’s forthcoming album Lover. When she switched record companies last fall, one of the conditions of her move was that going forward, she would own her masters, meaning she would have sole say over how and where her music was used. Swift, however, has pushed hard against that policy. Traditionally, record companies own an artist’s masters. Which means that if someone wants to license “You Belong With Me” so that they can put it on a TV show or in a movie or an ad, they need to get Braun’s permission, and they need to pay him a fee. And now, those rights belong to Scooter Braun. Anyone who wants to make a copy of the recording must ask for permission from the owner of the master rights. What’s more important is that owning the rights to a master recording means owning the right to make, sell, or distribute copies. In Swift’s case, that means the master recording of a song like “ You Belong With Me” is the actual record she made in the studio in 2009, and all the copies of the song that exist in the world - on YouTube, on Spotify, on iTunes, on CDs - are copies of that record. The master recording of a song is the first recording of it, the one that all copies are made from. ![]() The big issue here is that Scooter Braun now owns all of Taylor Swift’s old master recordings. As her public image has evolved, she’s increasingly courted major public feuds of the sort where everyone is invited to take sides - and increasingly, it seems that no matter how the headlines play out for her, Swift is winning. That kind of divisiveness has become par for the course with Swift. But Braun has his own allies, including huge pop star clients like Bieber and Demi Lovato, and they’re painting Braun as a misunderstood good guy being bullied by a mob. ![]() Swift’s supporters, including musicians Halsey and Iggy Azalea, have been tweeting under the hashtag #WeStandWithTaylor, applauding Swift for her willingness to speak out against industry figures as powerful as Braun in an effort to protect her work and her artistry. On social media, the response to Swift’s Tumblr post has been heavily divisive. Everyone involved presented the move as a cordial business decision with no hard feelings involved - until this week, when Swift wrote her Tumblr post decrying both Borchetta and Braun as toxic manipulators. ![]() Swift began her career as a musician at Big Machine Label when she was 15, and she stayed there until last fall, when she switched to Universal Music Group’s Republic Record in a highly publicized deal. Swift herself had been trying to buy her old master recordings for years, she wrote, but Big Machine founder Scott Borchetta - “someone for whom the term ‘loyalty’ is clearly just a contractual concept,” per Swift - had refused to budge. Braun, she declared, was an “incessant, manipulative bully,” and now he owned all of her masters. “This is my worst case scenario,” Swift wrote in an emotional Tumblr post published later that same day. Swift - whose master recordings of her past six albums are all owned by Big Machine - was outraged. Braun currently works with Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande, among numerous other entertainers, and in the past he’s worked with Kanye West. On Sunday, the Big Machine Label Group announced that it had been acquired by music mega-manager Scooter Braun and his company Ithaca Holdings. And now Swift’s loyalists - and loyalists to those executives - are feuding across the Internet, in a fight that involves some of the biggest names in music. This past Sunday, June 30, Swift published an explosive Tumblr post accusing two major music executives of bullying her. Typically, record company sales don’t trend on social media, but when Taylor Swift is involved, all bets are off. ![]()
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