Scooter Braun and his media holding company Ithaca Holdings LLC have sold the master rights to Taylor Swift’s first six albums. Ithaca announced its acquisition of Big Machine Label Group back in June 2019, giving the company the rights to Swift’s albums for the label. Swift says the masters were sold to a private equity company called Shamrock Holdings for more than $300 million.
After news about the sale emerged, Swift tweeted the below statement explaining why she wasn’t sold her masters. She also confirmed plans to re-record her music, saying she has “plenty of surprises in store.” Swift says her team attempted to negotiate with Braun about bidding on her own work, but was told she’d have to sign an NDA prohibiting her from talking about Braun in a less-than-positive way. “My legal team said that this is absolutely NOT normal, and they’ve never seen an NDA like this presented unless it was to silence an accuser by paying them off,” she wrote. “He would never even quote my team a price. These master recordings were not for sale to me.” The letter claims that Braun will continue to profit from her catalog “for many years.”
Taylor Swift signed with Universal Music Group and Republic Records in 2018. She has released two albums for Republic: Lover and folklore.
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