In case you missed the news, The Free Press has a new culture podcast. It’s called “Second Thought,” and it’s hosted by Suzy Weiss. This week’s guest is a big one: Scooter Braun. You might know him as the guy who discovered Justin Bieber, or as the superagent cast as a villain by Taylor Swift, or as Sydney Sweeney’s new squeeze. Braun became one of music’s most powerful kingmakers, and helped define pop culture in the internet age. If you haven’t listened to Suzy’s podcast yet, (a) where have you been?, and (b) this episode is a great place to start. Follow the show here, or wherever you get your podcasts, and scroll down to watch her conversation with Braun and read Suzy’s accompanying column. —The Editors
In 2007, when Scooter Braun stumbled upon a video of a 12-year-old Justin Bieber singing a cover of Ne-Yo’s “So Sick” on the streets of Ontario, he knew immediately what to do: make the teenager a global superstar. “Sometimes you get a download,” Braun told me. “A blueprint just gets sent into your head, and it’s so clear what you should be doing, and it doesn’t matter what anyone in the world tells you.”
Braun, who I recently interviewed in Los Angeles for my podcast Second Thought, told me he saw explosive talent in the young Bieber—“He was charismatic, he was brave”—and envisioned him as the 21st century’s answer to a young Michael Jackson; a kid, soulfully singing love songs for the masses. He was right. In 2008, after flying the tween Bieber and his mother to Atlanta—it was their first-ever plane ride—he signed Bieber as a client. Over the next 15 years, Bieber, with Braun behind him, would sell millions of tickets to world tours, and become the youngest-ever solo artist to have eight No. 1 Billboard 200 albums, breaking Elvis Presley’s record.
It wasn’t only Justin Bieber. Braun went on to engineer the meteoric rises of Ariana Grande, J Balvin, David Guetta, Demi Lovato, and even, for a spell, Kanye West. “If I like something, why shouldn’t millions of other people like it?” Braun told me about his populist and very “ordinary” sensibilities. On his way up “Mount Pop Music,” Braun made early bets on tech companies too—Spotify, Uber, and Dropbox among them. In other words, Braun was getting rich, his clients were selling out stadiums, and he seemed to have a Midas touch when it came to cultural resonance.
Then it all came crashing down.
One of the things that Braun understood earlier than most was the power of social media. These networks were not just for discovering acts but for cultivating and mobilizing fan bases that would stream their music, buy their merch, and sell out their concerts. “We involved them so intimately in the building that they are just as responsible for the success of these artists as I was,” said Braun, who, in part, architected the transition from old-fashioned fan clubs to hyper-online fandoms, as his acts became hugely popular on- and offline.
But in 2019, one fandom, the Swifties, who idolize the country-singer-turned-pop-phenomenon Taylor Swift, came to consider Braun their archnemesis. Turned out, hyper-intimate fan relationships cut both ways.
One of the things that Braun understood earlier than most was the power of social media.
Here’s what happened: Swift signed with Big Machine Records, based in Nashville, when she was 15. For years, she asked to buy the rights to her masters—the original studio recordings of her, which are typically owned by record labels, and from which they get a profit when songs are streamed—but she and the label couldn’t come to an agreement. “For years I asked, pleaded for a chance to own my work,” she wrote in a Tumblr post in 2019.
Then, after a deal saw her catalog come under Braun’s ownership, she went nuclear.
“I was denied the chance to purchase my music outright, my entire catalog was sold to Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings,” Swift thundered while accepting Billboard’s Woman of the Decade Award in 2019. “This just happened to me without my approval, consultation, or consent.” She went on: “The definition of the toxic male privilege in our industry is people saying, ‘But he’s always been nice to me,’ when I’m raising valid concerns about artists and their rights to own their music.” Swift vowed to rerecord her own songs as an act of defiance; meanwhile, her fans descended upon Braun on her behalf. He was the subject of death threats and endless online ire. Leave it to Swift, a master in storytelling, to take a complicated legal dispute and thread it into a story about betrayal and exploitation—with Braun at the center.
WATCH MY FULL INTERVIEW WITH SCOOTER BRAUN BELOW, OR LISTEN TO IT HERE:
It’s a story reminiscent of The Little Mermaid: A young woman sells her voice for access to a world she idealizes but doesn’t totally understand—except in this version, she fights back, unwilling to let the private equity–funded powers profit from the music she put her heart into. The saga had an air of truthiness, even if it seemed a little pat.
Except: It seems that all the contracts that Swift signed were standard for the music industry, and that the label offered her the opportunity to buy her masters—and later warned her that a deal was forthcoming. What’s more, Swift’s dad was an investor in Big Machine Records, and netted around $15 million from the sale. Braun also offered Swift the chance to buy back her masters after he acquired the label, which he off-loaded for a profit in 2020, but she refused because it required her to sign an NDA, and because Braun would continue to profit off of them.
