A lawyer for Taylor Swift has denied a claim by her former label head that the singer was given the opportunity to buy her master tapes after they were sold this week.
On Sunday, Swift responded to news that Big Machine Label Group (BMLG) founder Scott Borchetta had sold the company to music mogul Scooter Braun’s company Ithaca Holdings, describing the situation as her “worst case scenario”. BMLG released and owns the masters to Swift’s first six albums.
“When I left my masters in [Borchetta’s] hands, I made peace with the fact that eventually he would sell them,” she wrote. “Never in my worst nightmares did I imagine the buyer would be Scooter.” She alleged that Braun had bullied her; he works with Kanye West, whose music video for Famous depicts an unclothed likeness of Swift, which she described as a “revenge porn music video which strips my body naked”. Braun has not issued a direct response to Swift’s allegations, but his wife Yael Cohen and Justin Bieber, who Braun manages, have responded on Instagram.
Swift said she “wasn’t given an opportunity to buy” her “life’s work”. Instead, she was given the opportunity to “‘earn’ one album back at a time, one for every new one I turned in”.
In response to Swift’s post, Borchetta said that she “had every chance in the world to own not just her master recordings, but every video, photograph, everything associated to her career. She chose to leave.”
Swift’s lawyer, Donald Passman, has now said that Swift was not given the opportunity to “purchase her masters, or the label, outright with a cheque in the way [Borchetta] is now apparently doing for others”.
In November 2018, Swift announced that she was leaving Big Machine, the label that signed her when she was 15, for Republic Records and Universal Music Group, which will release her seventh album, Lover, on 23 August. The deal gives her the rights to her master recordings.
In her Tumblr post, Swift wrote that she was glad to be “signed to a label that believes I should own anything I create”. She also advocated for artist ownership of songs and hoped that the next generation of singers and songwriters will “read this and learn about how to better protect themselves in a negotiation”.
