Scooter Braun has officially sold Taylor Swift‘s masters to an investment fund for a payout of over US$300 million, which includes the rights to all of Swift’s music from 2006 (the beginning of her career) to 2016.
According to a report by Variety, the deal was closed sometime in the last two weeks, and was made between Braun’s company Ithaca Holdings LLC and an unknown investment fund.
Taylor Swift’s masters include the rights to her albums ‘Taylor Swift’ (2006), ‘Fearless’ (2008), ‘Speak Now’ (2010), ‘Red’ (2012), ‘1989’ (2014) and ‘Reputation’ (2016). Recent albums ‘Lover’ and ‘Folklore’ remain under her control.
Over the last few years, Swift and Braun have been at each others throats over the masters, with Swift slamming Braun in a Tumblr post in 2019. Basically, if you’ve missed a big chunk of the drama, Braun bought the record label Big Machine last year, including all of Taylor Swift’s masters for US$300 million.
Swift was proper ticked off because according to her, she was never offered the chance to buy the rights for herself. It’s really just extra salt in the wounds that Braun has now gone and sold them for the same price he essentially bought them for.
“For years I asked, pleaded for a chance to own my work. Instead I was given an opportunity to sign back up to Big Machine Records and ‘earn’ one album back at a time, one for every new one I turned in,” she wrote on Tumblr.
In response to this, Braun then claimed that he and his family were receiving violent death threats from fans of Swift, and felt unsafe for their life.
In recent months, Swift has made it very clear that she eventually intends to rerecord all of her old music, essentially releasing her discography again to ensure she has the rights to her own music.
“It’s something that I’m very excited about doing because my contract says that starting November 2020, so next year, I can record albums one through five all over again,” she told Good Morning America in a 2019 interview.
“I’m very excited about it. I just think that artists deserve to own their own work. I just feel very passionately about that.”
I for one cannot wait to hear the re-releases, despite them being born out of Scooter Braun’s turbo fuckery.
