Taylor Swift Says She's Re-Recording All Her Old Music in Light of the Scooter Braun Drama
In late June, news broke that Justin Bieber’s manager, Scooter Braun, had acquired Taylor Swift’s back catalog of music as part of his purchase of Scott Borchetta’s Big Machine Label Group. (Big Machine was Swift’s old label.) Pretty much everyone, from Halsey to Todrick Hall to Justin Bieber, had something to say about the situation, and voices on social media (including Kelly Clarkson) even urged her to consider the biggest power move possible: re-recording her entire catalogue.
And it turns out that’s exactly what Swift has decided to do. A short transcript from her recent appearance on CBS Sunday Morning reveals that the pop star is planning to head back to the studio and create brand new masters of all the songs that Braun now owns. Here’s exactly what she said when correspondent Tracy Smith asked her if she was going to re-record everything.
“Might you do that?” Smith asks.
“Oh yeah,” Swift says.
“That’s a plan?” Smith asks.
“Yeah, absolutely,” Swift answers.
As a recap, the whole drama started when Big Machine Records—the Scott Borchetta-owned label that Swift was on for a bulk of her career—was acquired by Braun’s company, Ithaca Holdings. In a Tumblr post, Swift insisted that she didn’t know about the sale until it was announced and that she wasn’t given the chance to buy her music. She also expressed her frustration that the songs she’d worked so hard on were now owned by someone she says had subjected her to “incessant, manipulative bullying.”
“When I left my masters in Scott’s hands, I made peace with the fact that eventually he would sell them. Never in my worst nightmares did I imagine the buyer would be Scooter,” she wrote. “Any time Scott Borchetta has heard the words ‘Scooter Braun’ escape my lips, it was when I was either crying or trying not to. He knew what he was doing; they both did. Controlling a woman who didn’t want to be associated with them. In perpetuity. That means forever.”
It’s unclear when Taylor Swift is going to start this project, but it’s going to be a huge undertaking. It comes right as her seventh studio album, Lover, is scheduled to drop on August 23. The full CBS interview will be out on August 25.