Scott Borchetta Bet On Scooter Braun — And Lost Taylor Swift

Two names Swifties won’t forgive: Scooter Braun and Scott Borchetta. The clash over Taylor Swift’s masters sparked a re-recording revolution—here’s how it unfolded and why fans are still fired up.

If you have even a passing interest in Taylor Swift, you know the names Scooter Braun and Scott Borchetta are the ones that make Swifties see red. Here is the whole saga, cleaned up and in order, with the why behind all those Taylor's Version re-records and how we landed at the latest twist.

The short version, in order

• 2009: Taylor meets Braun while he manages Justin Bieber, who does opening sets on Swift's Fearless tour.
• Big Machine era: Swift is signed to Scott Borchetta's Big Machine Records for her first six albums: Taylor Swift (aka Debut), Fearless, Speak Now, Red, 1989, and Reputation.
• Nov 2018: She leaves Big Machine and signs with Universal Music Group.
• Mid-2019: Borchetta sells Big Machine to Braun in a deal valued around $300 million, which includes the master recordings for those six Swift albums.
• Dec 2019: Swift uses her Billboard Woman of the Decade speech to call out what she sees as a double standard and addresses Braun directly.
• 2020: Braun sells Swift's catalog rights to Shamrock Holdings for a reported $405 million. Swift says she was not told until after the deal closed.
• 2021 and beyond: She starts rolling out the Taylor's Version re-records, complete with surprise Vault tracks, which chart and stream like brand-new records.
• Recently: Swift says she now owns her work in full, following a fresh deal that she credits to Shamrock being willing to give her full autonomy.

How the fire started

The flashpoint was Borchetta selling Big Machine to Braun. That put Swift's first six album masters in Braun's hands. She says there was no heads-up and no conversation, just a done deal she learned about along with everyone else. That alone would have been explosive. But it got messier.

Swift posted a long Tumblr note at the time and highlighted a Justin Bieber Instagram from the old days: a FaceTime screenshot of Bieber with Braun and Kanye West captioned 'Taylor swift what up.' She called that bullying and said the idea of her catalog landing with Braun was her worst-case scenario.

She also claimed she'd spent years asking Big Machine for a path to own her work outright and was offered a trade-off: re-sign and 'earn' one old album back for each new one delivered. She walked, assuming Borchetta would eventually sell. She just didn't expect the buyer to be Braun, a person she associates with public jabs and private pressure. She signed that Tumblr letter 'Sad and grossed out, Taylor.'

The onstage reckoning

At Billboard's Women in Music in December 2019, Swift took a victory lap and a flamethrower at the same time. She said Braun never contacted her before the Big Machine sale and pushed back on the industry reflex to defend powerful guys because they are 'nice' to the right people.

'Of course, Scooter never contacted me or my team to discuss it prior to the sale or even when it was announced... the definition of 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.'

Re-records as revenge... and business plan

Out of that smoke came Taylor's Version. She hit the studio, rebuilt the records from scratch, and sweetened the pot with Vault cuts. The re-records did something rare: they moved and streamed like new releases while subtly undercutting demand for the old masters she didn't control. Not subtle, but effective.

Then the catalog moved again

In October 2020, Braun flipped the catalog to Shamrock Holdings for roughly $405 million. Swift said the sale covered 100% of her music, videos, and album art from the Big Machine era and claimed the buyers were told not to inform her until the ink was dry. She also flagged that Braun would keep profiting for a period via ongoing involvement, which was a dealbreaker for any partnership from her side. So she kept re-recording.

The left-field update: how she says she got it back

Recently, Swift posted an Instagram of herself on the floor surrounded by those six albums with the caption 'You belong with me' and colored hearts matching each era. That post pointed people to a longer note on her site where she said, in plain language, that everything she has ever made now belongs to her. That includes the albums, videos, album art, photography, concert films, and unreleased songs — the whole archive.

She thanked Shamrock for enabling her to have full autonomy. And in a surprisingly un-Hollywood twist, she told the New Heights podcast that it was her mom and her brother — not a swarm of power lawyers — who went in to help negotiate. According to Swift, after an early meeting her mom called to say the other side had listened but gave no guarantees. A few months later, after the Super Bowl, Swift was in Kansas City when her mom called with four words: 'You got your music.'

What sticks

However you feel about the players involved, the throughline is simple: Swift wanted control, didn't get it, built leverage with the re-records, and — by her account — closed the loop years later. It's a story about ownership, but also about stubbornness paying off. And yes, it's very showbiz that it started with a sale and ended with a phone call from mom.