Taylor Swift and The Fight For Her Masters
Taylor Swift battles it out with Scooter Braun and Scott Borchetta for the rights to her old music.
Look what you made her do!
On Thursday, November 14th, Taylor Swift posted a message online about the recent drama between the pop artist and Scooter Braun and Scott Borchetta. In the message, Taylor let her fans know that she will be recognized as Artist of the Decade at the American Music Awards this year. She continued her post by stating that Borchetta and Braun are not allowing her to perform any of her old songs at the AMA performance.
But how can someone stop a singer from performing their art?
Back in June, Taylor made another post on social media to shine a light on these two men, who no one really knew about. She revealed that Big Machine Records, her old record label, had been sold by Borchetta to Braun for $300 million. Swift revealed that she was not aware of this business transaction until it hit the news. This transaction might not seem like a big deal; however, Scooter not only bought the record label, but the masters to Taylor Swift’s first six albums.
WHAT’S A MASTER? WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT? EXPLAIN
On top of this shady deal, Braun has bullied Taylor Swift online in the past. In Swift’s message, she said that Borchetta knew about her feelings towards Braun, and that his owning her art was her “worst case scenario.” Braun manages many popular artists, and some of them decided to join the feud online. One of those artists is Justin Bieber, who went to Instagram to post his thoughts on the situation. When commenting on Taylor Swift’s message, Justin wrote, “Seems to me like it was to get sympathy u also knew that in posting that your fans would go and bully scooter.”
The feud died down following the release of Swift’s seventh album, Lover, on August 23rd. However, in an interview a few weeks after its release, Swift revealed that she would be re-recording her first albums to essentially take back her art. However, she would not be allowed to record the new versions of her old songs until 2020 because of a contract she signed with her new record label. This presented an opportunity to Borchetta and Braun.
Braun and Borchetta claim to have good reasons for not allowing Swift to perform any of her old songs at the AMA show. They claim that her performing those songs would be “re-recording” her songs and would therefor be breaking her contract. In addition, they told Swift that she would also not be allowed to use of any of her old music or performance footage for her new Netflix documentary.
When asked about this situation, music fan and Lafayette Senior Amelia Engstrom says, “I think that artists should own what they make.”
Lafayette Senior Madison Damion agrees. “I think this situation is horrible and Taylor should be able to own the songs she wrote,” she said.
This situation has caused many artists, other than Swift, to post online about their frustration. Swifties from around the world have also been venting on social media sites about the situation. However, it truly comes down to one simple question: Why can’t artists own what they have created? Taylor Swift wrote the majority of her songs, some when she was just a teenager. Maybe if music professionals acted like civil human beings, her art wouldn’t have been sold out from under her feet.
