Scooter Braun Denies Taylor Swift Song Is About Him

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3 days ago

It's fair to say that since 2019, Scooter Braun's name has been most prominently associated with Taylor Swift, with the singer publicly putting him on blast after his company, Ithaca Holdings, bought her old record label, Big Machine Records, from her former manager, Scott Borchetta, for $300 million.
If you need reminding, the deal meant that Scooter would profit from the sales and use of all of the music that Taylor released through Big Machine during her 10-year contract with them, which included her first six albums. Prior to this point, Scooter had managed both Justin Bieber and Kanye West, with Taylor embroiled in a pretty infamous feud with the latter for several years. The feud had reignited in 2016, and at the peak of her downfall, Justin posted a screenshot of a FaceTime call with laughing Scooter and Kanye to his Instagram page alongside the goading caption: 'Taylor swift what up."Which is why it's pretty unsurprising that Taylor wasn't exactly thrilled that Scooter now owned her life's work, and she addressed this in a lengthy Tumblr post shortly after news of the Big Machine sale went public. In the statement, Taylor said she didn't sign a new contract with Big Machine because she knew Scott was planning to sell. She also revealed that she rejected a new contract even though it offered her the opportunity to 'earn' the rights to one old album for every new one she released.
The star then said that Scott selling to Scooter was her 'worst case scenario' as she called out the 'incessant, manipulative bullying' she'd received at Scooter's hands over the years. Taylor went on to allege that Scooter had 'stripped' her of her life's work that she 'wasn't given the opportunity to buy.'
'When I left my masters in Scott's hands, I made peace with the fact that eventually he would sell them. Never in my worst nightmares did I imagine the buyer would be Scooter,' she wrote. 'Any time Scott Borchetta has heard the words 'Scooter Braun' escape my lips, it was when I was either crying or trying not to.'Scooter has addressed the situation several times over the years, and previously said that he thought it was 'unfair' how everything went down so publicly, and that he thought he'd have the opportunity to 'be in business' with Taylor. The music exec ended up selling Taylor's catalog, including all associated videos and artwork, to Shamrock Holdings for over $300 million in October 2020 — just over a year after he bought Big Machine.The following month, Taylor issued a statement revealing that she and Scooter's respective teams had been in negotiations for her to regain ownership of the masters, but she backed out when his team allegedly asked her to sign an 'ironclad NDA' stating she would never say another word about Scooter 'unless it was positive.'She went on to explain that while she had been 'open' to partner with Shamrock when they initially reached out to her, she was left dismayed to learn that the terms of Scooter's sale meant that his company would continue to profit from her work. 'As soon as we started communication with Shamrock, I learned that under their terms Scooter Braun will continue to profit off my old musical catalog for many years,' Taylor wrote. 'I was hopeful and open to the possibility of a partnership with Shamrock, but Scooter's participation is a non-starter for me.'As you probably know, this whole situation led to Taylor rerecording her first six albums — complete with brand new tracks 'from the vault' — in order to have ownership of her music, and she only had her self-titled debut and 2016 album Reputation left to re-release when she announced earlier this year that she'd bought the rights to the original master recordings from Shamrock for a reported $360 million.
And Scooter has now opened up some more about this whole experience during a recent appearance on the Question Everything podcast, where he even shut down a years-old fan theory that one of Taylor's most brutal revenge songs, 'Vigilante Shit,' is about him.
Speaking to host Danielle Robay, he admitted that it feels like a 'waste of time' to rehash the six-year-old situation all over again, before doubling down on his past claims that Taylor's team had actually been in negotiation to buy her masters from him when she published that original Tumblr post.
'When Taylor says that she wasn't offered the masters, the reason I was under NDA was because we were in negotiations to sell it back to her,' he claimed. 'I just choose to believe her that maybe they [her team] didn't tell her.''Taylor and I have only met three times in our life, and I think at that point we hadn't seen each other in two, three years,' Scooter went on. 'I was managing people she wasn't a fan of, and she probably saw my name come up and was like: 'I don't like those people, so I don't like him.' But we never had an opportunity to sit in front of each other and actually have a conversation to this day.'He also shut down Taylor's claim that he wanted her masters for 'nefarious reasons,' saying: 'I don't have any nefarious reasons… That was a major risk for me at the time, to buy that company. I couldn't afford to do it for nefarious reasons, like, just from a financial standpoint, that doesn't make any sense. I needed her to be successful for me to take that risk. There's nothing nefarious about it.''I just wish that it didn't take such a toll on my family,' Scooter then said. 'It was a very tough time for us, because there's a lot of people out there that don't understand, and they hear this stuff and they take it to a level that's really not OK.'
Scooter was married to Yael Cohen when all of this was going down, with the two splitting in 2021. The couple share three children: 10-year-old Jagger, 9-year-old Levi, and 7-year-old Hart, and Scooter revealed that somebody said something 'very mean' to Jagger because of the messy Taylor situation.
'My kids were really young then,' he said when asked if he'd discussed what went down with them. 'But my oldest is 10, and someone said something very mean to him at school… But the beautiful thing is, I didn't have to talk that much because my kids know who their dad is.'
One year after the breakdown of Scooter and Yael's marriage, Taylor released her 2022 album Midnights, which includes the brutal revenge song 'Vigilante Shit' that many interpreted to be about Scooter.
'She needed cold, hard proof, so I gave her some / She had the envelope, where you think she got it from?' Taylor sings. 'Now she gets the house, gets the kids, gets the pride / Picture me thick as thieves with your ex-wife / And she looks so pretty / Driving in your Benz / Lately she's been dressing for revenge.''Did you ever think these [lyrics] were about you?' Danielle bluntly asked Scooter on the podcast, and he immediately insisted that they weren't.
'No, because I talk to Yael every day,' he retorted. 'My ex-wife is one of my best friends, so me and my ex-wife laugh about that stuff. We don't even call each other ex. That's like my partner, you know? That's the mother of my children. That is my family for life.'
'I have a tattoo on my finger that says: 'Same team' after my divorce, because she and I are same team for life,' he continued. 'It's what we say to each other. So, no, I never thought that was about us, she never thought it was about us, and everyone else kind of feeding into the fire… Great strategy move, but, like, no.'
Elsewhere in the podcast, Scooter insisted that everybody involved in the masters mess ended up winning in the end, saying: 'She could have bought them back and that could have been part of the victory… But I choose to think her team maybe didn't tell her. But when they turned it down, we ended up selling it to someone else because she didn't want us to have it. We did very well in that sale because we bought it at a really great price, and the value of the masters went up.'
Scooter explained that Taylor's re-records actually resulted in the original recordings getting more listeners because people would play them to compare the tracks, profiting Shamrock. 'She did incredibly well and basically had the biggest moment of her career, reinvigorating her career with each one,' he said. 'It was brilliant on her part. But also, each time she released one, you saw a spike in the original catalog.''So, funny enough, everyone involved in the saga, from a business standpoint, won,' Scooter concluded. 'She's the biggest she's ever been, biggest artist of all time. We did really well with the asset. The people who bought the asset did really well because of those spikes.'He then added: 'I wish kids and people out there understood that, like, there are scenarios in life where there doesn't need to be an oppressor and oppressed, there are scenarios in life where it's a misunderstanding, yet everyone can succeed.'
What do you make of Scooter's latest comments? Let me know down below!