The End of Taylor Swift's $300 Million Fight With Scooter Braun

When Scooter Braun agreed to sell Taylor Swift’s first six albums for $300 million, it wasn’t just a good deal for the manager and his investors. It was the end of a year-long headache that started with his purchase of Big Machine, Swift's old label.

Braun, the manager of Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber, had purchased Big Machine to accelerate his efforts to become a mogul. Big Machine had an active roster of country stars and generates cash. But moments after the deal was announced, Swift assailed Braun as a duplicitous bully.

Swift repeatedly declined to speak to me about her beef with Braun, but all along it’s been clear she was using personal animus towards him to make a few larger points about the music business. Swift framed her tale as a classic case of the industry’s imbalance of power — the label getting rich off the artist — and societal sexism — a man controlling a woman’s work.

Swift was never the ideal messenger. Unlike many artists, Swift has access to capital she could have used to buy the label. She might even be rich enough to buy it on her own.

The underlying message is nonetheless an appealing one: artists should own their work, and Swift, unlike many artists, is powerful enough not to fret about the blowback. Swift never wanted to buy Big Machine, she just wanted her masters.

Without knowing the full back story of her relationship with Braun, Swift’s criticism struck many long-time music industry figures as misplaced. Big Machine owned Taylor Swift’s first six albums because Scott Borchetta had bet on her as an unproven teenager and helped turn her into a star.

Borchetta didn't want to sell her masters on their own because it would reduce the value of his other assets. Braun used his access to capital to buy an appealing asset, which has helped him weather the pandemic. (Whether Braun handled the acquisition gracefully is another story.)

“Two sides knowingly entered into a contract, and both sides fulfilled the hell out of that contract,” Bill Werde, the director of the Bandier Music Business Program at Syracuse University, told me earlier this year about Swift's deal with Big Machine. “Labels invest time and money in artists. And labels want things. Masters are typically one of those things. That’s the deal we make.”

This dynamic isn’t unique to music. Movie directors almost never own their films, nor do TV creators own their shows. They get a piece of future profits from the studio, which provided the upfront money to make the shows (much like a bank).

Musicians have a harder time accepting this arrangement because the physical act of creation often involves just a handful of people. It's not a sprawling movie set. “Should artists own their masters? In a perfect world yes,” Werde says.

And yet, like it or not, their creation becomes an asset, as we were reminded this week. Los Angeles-based firm Shamrock Capital didn’t buy Taylor Swift. It bought a catalog that it believes will generate enough money to justify the investment, or appreciate enough in value that they can trade it for even more in the future.

Swift always argued that Big Machine didn't give her a chance to buy her work. She would have to earn the albums back by resigning with Big Machine. (This is, unfortunately, also common in music.)

People close to Braun always maintained that he would have sold Swift her work (at a higher price than he paid). And in the case of the Shamrock deal, Swift was given an opportunity to buy into her music. She said no. Not because she was mad that she didn’t own it, but because Braun would profit from it.

Swift does have one more card up her sleeve, and she'd already begun to play it. She is going to re-record her first six albums, and nobody is going to stand in her way.

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