Scooter Braun is urging Taylor Swift fans to “move on” from his years-long feud with the singer. The former music manager and current CEO of HYBE America, who bought Taylor Swift’s old record label with rights to her masters and then sold them, addressed the topic last night at a Bloomberg Screentime event in Los Angeles, according to Deadline.
When asked if he had seen two-part Max documentary, Taylor Swift vs Scooter Braun: Bad Blood, Braun confirmed that he had seen it. “I watched it recently,” Braun confirmed. “I wasn’t going to watch it because I just thought it was going to be, like, another hit piece. And I pretty much stayed quiet about this kind of stuff. And my dad called me and my mom, and they were like, ‘We just watched it. We think you should watch it.’ So I did.”
In terms of the subject matter itself, Braun noted, “Look, it’s five years later. I think, everyone, it’s time to move on.” Still, he had some concerns about the way he was portrayed in the documentary series.
“There were a lot of things that were misrepresented,” he told the audience. “I think that it’s important in any kind of conflict that people actually communicate directly with each other. I think doing it out on social media and in front of the whole world is not the place. And I think when people actually take the time to stand in front of each other have a conversation, they usually find out the monster’s not real, and that hasn’t happened. And that has not happened.”
Braun came under fire in 2019 when his company, Ithaca Holdings, acquired Scott Borchetta’s music label Big Machine, whose assets included the master rights to Swift’s first six albums. Swift said she wasn’t told about the sale in advance. The following year, Braun sold Swift’s masters to private equity firm Shamrock Capital.
“This was the second time my music had been sold without my knowledge,” Swift wrote on social media in response. “A few weeks ago my team received a letter from a private equity company called Shamrock that they had bought 100% of my music, videos and album art from Scooter Braun. The letter told me that they wanted to reach out before the sale to let me know but that Scooter Braun had required that they make no contact with me or my team or the deal would be off.”
Swift has responded by re-recording her albums as Taylor’s Versions to ensure she owns her own music. Taylor Swift vs Scooter Braun: Bad Blood used its two episodes to showcase each side of the feud, with the first covering Swift’s perspective and the second focusing on Braun. It reiterated Swift’s assertion that her music was sold without her knowledge.
Elsewhere during his appearance at the Bloomberg Screentime event Braun responded to a question about which artist he would select to build a new company around if he was starting out in music management today.
“I’m going to give you the soundbite you’re looking for, because I just can’t help myself,” Braun said. “The PR team is going to be like, ‘What?’ I think the artist that’s one that you should always bet on, and is already a huge star, and you can always bet on because they want it all the time, and they do what it takes to be, you know, present all the time, is Taylor Swift.”
Braun has previously reflected on the situation between him and Swift. In 2022, he appeared on NPR’s The Limits podcast to discuss the “important lesson” he claims he learned from the saga. He admitted he came from a “place of arrogance,” assuming that he and Swift could work things out.
“I think a lot of things got lost in translation,” Braun said. “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. 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.”