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In May, Taylor Swift purchased her original masters from Shamrock Capital, ending some six years of back-and-forth and rerecorded albums. In 2020, Scooter Braun, a mogul and the manager of acts like Kanye West and Justin Bieber, sold Swift’s masters to Shamrock. There’s been a bit of he-said, she-said about whether Swift had the opportunity to purchase the masters from Braun, but no matter. “The cool part is, if you actually pay attention, everybody in the end won,” Braun said in comments delivered ahead of Swift’s purchase, but published today.
Braun in a new episode of Question Everything with Danielle Robay (which Robay notes in the YouTube description was filmed in April), where he claims again that “she could have bought them back,” but “her team maybe didn’t tell her.” “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. And when I sold it, she had announced she was gonna do re-records,” Braun continues (via Variety). According to him, as successful as the rerecords were, they also boosted interest significantly in the original recordings. Because Braun had signed an earn-out agreement with his sale of the masters to Shamrock, the surge in interest was still financially beneficial for him, and he says, “We hit every one of our earn-outs, and we were right.”
“People were going on and they were A/B-ing them. They were listening in to see how much they sounded like [the originals],” Braun continues now. “So she did incredibly well and basically had the biggest moment of her career, reinvigorating her career with each one. It was brilliant on her part, but also each time she released one, you saw a spike in the original catalog. And that’s how we were able to tell, OK, if she doesn’t want them, this is still a really great asset.” Of course, Swift did want them, though she obviously benefited handsomely from the rerecordings, and interest in those rerecordings benefited from the public drama between the singer and Braun. “The only thing that I’m sad about is, that’s a great example where all ships can rise and there doesn’t need to be an enemy,” Braun says, but maybe this is the kind of situation where having an enemy helps those ships rise.
