What I'm about to say feels on-par with, "OJ was innocent," and, "I could really go for an Almond Joy right now," in the field of absurd provocative statements, but I have to say it.
I don't think Scooter Braun did anything wrong.
But it's more complicated than that.
I'm obviously referring to Taylor Swift's recent campaign to rerecord her first six albums as a middle finger to industry mogul Scooter Braun, who acquired the masters to these albums in 2019 much to Taylor's outrage. There's a lot to cover here, so I'm going to split it into two parts: what actually happened, and what it all stands for.
Let's start with a little context. The business of recorded music is centered around two key money-making vehicles: publishing rights and masters. The publishing rights refer exclusively to the songwriting. It has nothing to do with the actual recording of a song that you might hear on Spotify; it only refers to who wrote the lyrics and the melodies. On the other hand, the master of a song is the actual recording that was made in a professional studio or, more often than not nowadays, Jack Antonoff's bedroom. It refers to the track you physically hear when you play a song on Spotify. Generally speaking, whoever wrote a song owns the publishing rights, whoever paid for the song to get recorded owns the master, and whenever anyone buys or streams the song, both parties get paid.
Now, onto what actually happened with Scooter Braun. Plain and simple: he made a business deal. That is it. He's a business man, and business men like to make money. Taylor Swift was signed to Big Machine Records for her first six albums, and therefore Big Machine Records owned those masters. When the label was put up for sale in late 2018, Scooter's company Ithaca Holdings dropped $300 million to buy Big Machine Label Group, whose artist roster also included names like Reba McEntire, Sheryl Crow, Lady A, and Florida Georgia Line. But knowing that Taylor Swift was the most valuable artist of the bunch, Scooter sold off her masters to a separate company called Shamrock Holdings for around $300 million a little over a year later using a deal structure that also allows him to continue profiting off those masters even without owning them.
So basically, Scooter bought a crown, broke off the biggest jewel, and sold that jewel for more than he paid for the entire crown so that he not only made a quick profit but also got the rest of the crown practically for free. It was a baller business move.
Do I wish Scooter would have given Taylor a chance to buy her masters back? Yeah, that would've been a thoughtful thing to do. But he had no obligation to do that. That's not how art works. People are able to make a living making art because we accept that art is in itself a business, subject to the same capitalistic cruelties and injustices of any other industry. It's not like whenever a Picasso painting went to auction we contacted Picasso first to see if he'd like to buy it back. Any piece of art is a passion project as it's being made, but once it's finished, it becomes an asset that will be bought and sold time and time again like corporate bonds and oil futures.
So that's what really happened. Scooter made, by most accounts, an insanely good business transaction. Just because Taylor didn't like it doesn't mean Scooter did anything wrong.
But let's transition to what this all actually stands for.
Put simply, the music industry is an orgy of exploitation, and recording contracts are the Motel 6 bed in which it happens. In many circumstances, when an artist wants to record an album, a record label will front all the costs associated with recording that album in exchange for full ownership of the masters. When the album is released and fans start buying it, the label will pay the artist a percentage of all the proceeds, often somewhere in the ballpark of 10-20%. However, the label will also deduct funds directly from the artist's royalties to recoup the money it spent on recording the album. And here's the kicker: the artist often never regains ownership of the masters even when the recording costs are repaid in full.
Imagine you just bought a house and got a 30-year mortgage from the bank. Imagine you work hard and send all your payments to the bank on time and after 30 years, the mortgage is entirely paid off. But imagine what it would feel like if after all of that, the bank still owned the house. That's what recording contracts are often like.
Scooter Braun didn't wrong Taylor Swift. The music industry wronged Taylor Swift and virtually every other artist whose name you've ever seen on a record label. Musicians have been burned on deals like this for decades if not a century, and I think Taylor Swift rerecording her first six albums and bringing more attention to the importance of artists owning their own masters is the type of public service announcement young musicians have been desperately needing for ages. Case in point: Olivia Rodrigo owns all of her own masters specifically because Taylor Swift taught her she should. Taylor is by no means the first person to understand this concept or to be fighting the good fight here; legendary alternative producer Steve Albini famously requested to be paid a flat fee "like a plumber" for his work on Nirvana's In Utero rather than be paid a perpetual royalty out of the band's pocket, and Dave Grohl has released every single Foo Fighters album under his own Roswell Records label so that the band retains ownership of all their masters. But having a cultural force like Taylor Swift preach this message from the rooftops will be orders of magnitude more impactful, and even if it might not fundamentally shift the power dynamic between powerful labels and ambitious-but-powerless artists, it at least puts a very public spotlight on what's otherwise been a purposefully darkened corner of the music industry.
So why do I need to be either Team Scooter or Team Taylor on this one? At the end of the day, Scooter bought and sold an asset that he had every right to buy and sell, Taylor's career is hotter than ever because she's trying to one-up him, and every artist not named Taylor Swift is going to benefit from all of this education around why artists should try and negotiate master ownership into their recording contracts. Everyone is winning. I see no reason to be pissed.
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