Scooter Braun has one regret about how everything went down with Taylor Swift.
Let’s do a brief recap. Back in 2019, Taylor Swift’s former label, Big Machine Records (run by Scott Borchetta), sold the master recordings of her first six albums to Braun, who then sold them to an investment group after Swift began rerecording her old music in one of the biggest power moves in music history.
Swift was not made aware of the initial deal until the news broke to the public, writing that it was her “worst case scenario” in an emotional Tumblr post. “I learned about Scooter Braun’s purchase of my masters as it was announced to the world,” she wrote at the time.
Three years later Braun is opening up about the controversial deal in a new interview with NPR’s Jay Williams, claiming he was under “a very strict NDA” that made it impossible to warn Swift—or any other Big Machine artist—ahead of time. “I wasn’t legally allowed to,” he said, per E! News.
He continued, “I was excited to work with every artist on the label. So when we finalized the deal, I started making phone calls to say, ‘Hey, I’m a part of this.’ And before I could even do that—I made four phone calls; I started to do those phone calls—all hell broke loose.”
If Scooter Braun has one regret, it’s that he assumed the artists involved would be excited to work with him despite his turbulent history with Swift. “All I could think about was the incessant, manipulative bullying I’ve received at his hands for years,” Swift continued in her 2019 Tumblr post, referencing Braun’s alleged part in her feud with his client Kanye West. “Now Scooter has stripped me of my life’s work, that I wasn’t given an opportunity to buy. Essentially, my musical legacy is about to lie in the hands of someone who tried to dismantle it.”
However, Braun chalks up their disagreement to a lack of communication. “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,” he said. “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 learned an important lesson from that, that I can never make that assumption again. I can’t put myself in a place of arrogance to think that someone would just be willing to have a conversation and be excited to work with me. I don’t know these people.”
In December 2020, Swift compared the experience to a divorce. In between rerecordings, she is set to release her new album, Midnights, on October 21.