Scooter Braun sells Taylor Swift's Big Machine masters to investment fund for $300 million
Aux Features Music
What’s the word for a tale that is more elaborate and twisting and operatic than a saga? An epic? An odyssey? Whatever it’s called, that’s what the story of Taylor Swift and her old label Big Machine has become. It somehow started just last year, even though it seems like we’ve been dealing with this for our whole lives, when Swift’s old label, Big Machine, was purchased by Scooter Braun, the closest thing Swift has to a nemesis. He’s Kanye West’s former manager, and supposedly he—at the very least—was present for all of the annoying and petty shit that West had done over the years to piss Swift off. By buying Big Machine, he controlled the master recordings to Swift’s entire pre-Lover catalog and could do anything he wanted with them.
He didn’t end up doing much, maybe because the Swifties made it clear that they were watching, but now Variety says Braun is wiping his hands of the whole thing and selling off the rights to Swift’s first six albums in a deal that could be worth upwards of $300 million. Unfortunately for Swift, Braun seems to be selling the rights to the only entity worse than a rich guy with suspicious motives: An unnamed investment fund, a.k.a. possibly a whole group of rich guys with suspicious motives. Fans can yell at Scooter Braun on Twitter, asking him not to do mean stuff with Taylor Swift’s catalog, and Swift herself could release public statements denouncing him and the way he has treated her (directly and indirectly). But how do you yell at a faceless group of investors? How do you get people to care that an investment fund might misuse your music when everyone already assumes that investment funds will misuse anything they get their hands on?
The silver-lining to all of this is that Swift, as of this month, is now free to rerecord her first five albums, meaning she can at least put out new versions of most of her old songs and try to dilute the value of the original versions. She can convince fans the old versions are bad and should be ignored while providing them with hot new versions that actually support her and not investors, and knowing Swift, she’s going to sit on those until the best possible moment to stick it to whoever currently owns her old masters.
46 Comments
But how do you yell at a faceless group of investors?I’m sure Swifties will find a way.
This is why I yell at every white guy wearing a suit.
Well, that’s just good manners.
What if they’re literally faceless though? Like round mannequin heads with no eyes, ears, nose, or mouth?
How I view all business guys:
I may be stuck in a groove here…
Or this:
Pretty sure the guy on the right is the venture capitalist who currently owns the AV Club.
Accurate…very accurate.
Oh boy do I have a band for them –
What’s wrong with that?!
BWAAAH-HA-HA-HA-HA-HAAAH…!…
My first thought was of the Terrible Trivium from Phantom Tollbooth.
This is gonna lead to a massive doxxing scandal, I can sense it.
Not really sure why she couldn’t release those re-recordings already though.
Honestly the mixing is terrible on her first few albums. I get they were probably mastered for radio play/early iPods, so a remastered/rerecorded version of them would do great and sound a lot better.
Probably a casualty of the “loudness wars. Hope that the mastering engineers don’t compress the hell out of the dynamics if she does re-record the albums.
her voice is also massively better these days than it was when she started out. it still sucks that she had to be in this position at all, but a re-recording of some of her earlier songs could be a really cool silver lining
The 300 million dollars does seem like a risky investment. Depending on how vindictive she feels like being, she could put out a new version of the entire catalog every month for free with bonus tracks. If she has a decent producer, she could include versions that would sound nearly identical to non-specialists. I realize investment bankers are largely soulless monsters, but it seems like a property that can legally be closely duplicated and that the original creator is actively seeking to undermine should be approached with some skepticism. Are the masters valued at a billion dollars or something?
But isn’t the charm of those early Swift albums specifically that they are coming from a very teenage perspective? Wouldn’t having them re-recorded by a thirty year old in 2020 kind of defeat the purpose?
She could pull a Joni Mitchell and do a re-release double album of each, one with a straight-forward re-record and one with updated/reworked versions to reflect her experiences since the original takes. Even just doing a few tracks would be interesting to her fans.
I’ve heard TSwift from both sides now
Young and old and still somehow
Someone is trusting a dude named Scooter with million dollar deals?
What, this isn’t a face you can trust?
I barely trusted him to tell John Denver ‘two minutes to curtain’!
Please don’t post pics of Ed Sheeran without warning us first.
The concern with VC is that they will decide the parts of an asset are worth more than the whole if they are sold off, piece by piece. I’m not really sure that’s an issue here. Maybe they could sell off the rights to individual songs or albums, but it sounds like she already doesn’t have control of those and it isn’t like fans won’t be able to listen to them if they do. I don’t think they are going to be able to sell her kidneys or anything like that, so I’m not really sure what the issue is here? Sure, ideally she should own her own creative works, but she didn’t before they got sold to VC, right?
I’m really looking forward to hearing re-recorded versions of the early albums. I have all of them up to 1989 on CD, and listened to them a lot during my teenage years. (The only reason I haven’t bought the later ones is because I’m lazy and I have Spotify Premium.) It’ll be interesting to compare when the re-recorded versions are released. Taylor’s voice has changed over the years, and I think she has the potential to take what were originally very good songs and make them truly spectacular.For now, please enjoy Taylor’s sublime cover version of Phil Collins’ “Can’t Stop Loving You”.
Red especially I think can be improved, and plenty of people already like it.
“Can Stop Loving You” is one of my favorites, next to “If Loving You Is Wrong I Would Prefer To Be Right”
Love Story is perfection for me – always reminds me of a very happy time with a very special person. Of the hopefulness of youth against all odds. Thank you for sharing her epic live lounge version of ‘Can’t stop loving you’ – devastates me every time, how everything breaks under the right amount of force. Good God – am I a Swiftie?!!!
I freaking love Love Story. It was the first song of hers I heard, and will forever be among my favorites.And yes, you’re a Swiftie. Welcome to the club!
Considering her dad was a stockbroker, there’s a good chance the Swifts know some of these new owners.To think, all it takes to be successful in this country is raw talent and exorbitant inherited wealth.
You say their motives are “suspicious,” but we know their motives are exclusively accumulating more wealth at the expense of anything and anyone else.
Why, that sounds perfectly reasonable then.
I mean, it’s not like Swift’s original label was some anti-capitalist collective either.
That’s my point. “Music industry people play well-known music industry games” is a non-story. Taylor is more popular, so when she doesn’t like it, there’s enough mass in her 1% of superfans who care that something actually happens.
But if this were to happen to, like, Hoobastank, their 1% of superfans wouldn’t be enough to be noticeable.
When you boil this story down, it’s not like Scooter Braun did anything suspicious with them either. Barsanti chalks this up to the vigilant oversight of fans, but the story here is: music exec type buys rights to songs, later sells them for more money.
And that is why America no longer has Toys R Us. =[
she can at least put out new versions of most of her old songs and try to dilute the value of the original versions. She can convince fans the old versions are bad and should be ignored while providing them with hot new versionsHas this ever worked? I’ve heard of other artists trying something similar, but it never seems to make people stop listening to the original versions.
I think it’s worked with Oldies singles from the 60s and earlier.
Sometimes when I’m listening to Roy Orbison’s “Crying” I’m like…wait this is one of the other ones by himhaven’t looked into it, but for some reason, maybe just a lot of record label moves making him rerecord so they could release it also or something similar, but there are versions by him out there that are NOT the original and nowhere near as good
*sigh* what a great song. Chris Isaak does a good version, but no one is Roy.
Megadeth & Ozzy Osbourne both did it in the early 2000s, but for even shittier reasons (they wanted to screw their former bandmates out of royalties).
I love Taylor Swift, bless her heart. She may have had a silver staircase but she’s quite, quite talented. One of the rare cases of a sparkling background becoming a boon for all people. Can’t wait for new versions! Lover was terrific.
This probably won’t make it out of the grays but as a long haired and bearded hippie banker, I felt the need to interject. (TL;DR – just read the bracketed segments)The buyers here are probably a private equity fund, which [is often a two-pronged partnership of limited partners (LPs) and general partners (GPs). LPs provide the overwhelming majority of equity that is invested in deals like these (usually something like 80-90%) because they have a mandate to make a return on *their* pooled capital. In layperson terms, LPs are usually (but not always): endowments, charitable foundations, sovereign wealth funds, pensions, insurance companies and other retirement systems.] These massive asset managers have a goal to never run out of money to pay their liabilities like pensions, operating costs, retirement funds, scholarships, grants – you name it. Normally these liabilities are in perpetuity – nobody ever expects their pension fund to run out or their university to one day no longer exist (though that happens and will happen more frequently in the future). The GPs are the faceless rich guys you mentioned who often invest their own savings (remember it’s a partnership) alongside a deal like this so they have a direct incentive to return more money than the LPs invested to them. The GPs are also responsible for finding worthwhile investments that are nominally ethical (lest the LPs wake up to headlines they invested in carcinogenic chemical producing companies) and mitigate risk to their shareholders (ibid).[All that said, the unknown ‘suspicious’ motives at play here are very likely paying retired teachers or state workers, funding scholarships at private or large public universities, or providing funds to charities / NPOs for their mission.]ETA: I’m all for cancelling student debt, as I am swimming in six figures of it for the next decade, all just so I could write the above nonsense.