SCOTT BORCHETTA: BIG MACHINE OFFERED TAYLOR SWIFT THE CHANCE TO OWN HER MASTERS
The news that Scoot Borchetta’s Big Machine Label Group was being sold to Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings for circa $300m has caused some major fallout. In response to the news, Taylor Swift – whose first six studio albums are owned by BMLG – penned an open letter in which she claimed that the sale of her masters to Braun was beyond her “worst nightmares”. Swift suggested that she learned about the BMLG buyout “as it was announced to the world”, despite her father, Scott Swift, being a minority shareholder in Big Machine. (He is thought to own 4% of the company now being sold to Braun.) In addition, Swift claimed that, despite having “pleaded” with Borchetta to take ownership of her masters, the closest she came was a contract renewal offer from Big Machine which would have enabled her to “earn” back the rights to her albums one-by-one. She rejected this offer, she says, in favor of her new deal with Universal Music Group. Swift claimed: “[I] wa...