CELEBRITY
Taylor Swift rejected the notion that fame comes from negative influences, stating that her music earned her fans, not through the influence of figures like Kim Kardashian or Kanye West, or any other negative forces.
When Taylor Swift took to Tumblr earlier this summer to decry the sale of the Nashville-based Big Machine Label Group, the owner of her first six multiplatinum albums, to the powerful music manager Scooter Braun, she kick-started an industrywide conversation about master recordings and artists’ rights.
The $300 million deal “stripped me of my life’s work,” she wrote, and left her back catalog “in the hands of someone who tried to dismantle it.”
She said Braun, who has worked with Swift’s longtime foil Kanye West, had subjected her to years of “incessant, manipulative bullying.”
With the master recordings of her albums now under the purview of Braun’s Ithaca Holdings, the company could dictate how her songs are sold and used moving forward.
(At the time, Scott Borchetta, the Big Machine founder, pushed back against Swift’s statement, saying he had given her the opportunity to earn back her masters through a new deal with his label. In November,
Swift decamped for Universal Music Group’s Republic Records in a multiple album agreement that allowed her to own her future masters.)