Scooter Braun sparks ridicule as he claims feud with Taylor Swift boosted her career
Scooter Braun has raised eyebrows with a claim that his infamous feud with Taylor Swift helped improve her career. The 44-year-old music producer and the 35-year-old Wildest Dreams singer clashed in 2019 when he bought her old record label, Big Machine Label Group.
The deal included the master recordings of Taylor's first six records, leading her to bitterly lash out at the businessman. She then went on to re-record her albums and re-release them to huge financial reward.
This year, Taylor successfully bought back the rights to her own music after re-releasing four of the six albums in question, leading her to hint she may no longer re-record her debut and Reputation albums. Having enjoyed renewed success for the four albums she re-recorded, Scooter is now hinting that the feud that provoked the re-release of the records helped Taylor achieve a degree of success she would not otherwise have reached.
Fans of the star, however, have made it clear they do not agree with Scooter's theory - and they have ruthlessly mocked him for his comment. While Taylor's fans have bitterly reacted to Scooter's comments, he has praised the Lavender Haze singer while sharing his opinions.
Scooter appeared on Danielle Robay's Question Everything podcast, where they discussed his history with the chart-topping star. Discussing her re-recorded albums, he said: "She did incredibly well and basically had the biggest moment of her career, reinvigorating her career with each one.
It was previously reported that Scooter bought the Big Machine Records and Taylor's masters in 2019 for $300 million (£220 million). He later sold the records to an investment firm called Shamrock Holdings for $405 million (£300 million) - and then Swift herself reacquired the music in May for a reported $360 million (£268 million).
Scooter gushed: "It was brilliant on her part. But also, each time she released one, you saw a spike in the original catalog." He continued: "Funny enough, everyone involved in the saga, from a business standpoint, won.
"She's the biggest she's ever been, biggest artist of all time. We did really well with the asset. The people who bought the asset did really well because of those spikes.
"I wish kids and people out there understood that, like, there are scenarios in life where there doesn't need to be an oppressor and oppressed, there are scenarios in life where it's a misunderstanding, yet everyone can succeed."
His comments sparked a backlash among Taylor's fans, however, who took to social media to pan the businessman. One wrote on X: "She lives rent free in his little head."
And another typed: "Man takes credit for woman's success a tale as old as time." And a third wrote: "Is he obsessed or is he obsessed?"
Scooter is famous for helping discover Canadian pop star Justin Bieber - and the two famously parted ways, on a business level, in 2023. Earlier this month, Justin released his seventh studio album - which was his first since he ended his partnership with Scooter.
The businessman took to social media to praise the 31-year-old singer, however, writing ia Instagram Stories: 'Been having a beautiful start to the weekend and been getting a lot of texts about how I feel about Justin's new album.
"So I will just leave this here. This is without a doubt, the most authentically Justin Bieber album to date. It's beautiful, raw, and truly him. And that matters.'
He continued: 'I've had the privilege of witnessing his growth for almost two decades. Along every journey, there comes a time when an artist fully steps into their own — and that's what he's done here. He's poured his soul into this project, and you can feel it in every single run.
'The way he chose to release it is just as intentional as the music itself — and I'm happy to see him do it this way. I have played no roll in this one, but as someone who's always believed in him, I'm incredibly proud and impressed and genuinely enjoying the music."
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mirror
13 minutes ago
- Daily Mirror
Prince William and Harry's cousin claims late Queen was wrong on key Meghan decision
A distant cousin of the Princes has defended a decision made by Meghan Markle that reportedly angered the late Queen Elizabeth A distant cousin of Prince William and Prince Harry has spoken out in defence of Meghan Markle, and a decision she made on her wedding day. Maddison May Brudenell followed in the Duchess of Sussex's footsteps on her own wedding day, in particular, her dress. Maddison - the great-granddaughter of Lord Mountbatten, who is a third cousin to the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Sussex - married her husband in November 2024, opting to wear a white dress on her big day, just as Meghan did when she married Harry at Windsor Castle in 2018, despite being married once before. Sources have long claimed that the late Queen Elizabeth wasn't happy with Meghan's dress choice for the royal wedding, claiming that it 'too white' for a divorcee to wear for a second wedding. Maddison, who previously married DJ Olaoluwa Modupe-Ojo in 2015, claimed she received stern words from her own mother when choosing her wedding dress, and despite the protests, opted for a bespoke white gown to marry Canadian welder Bret Kapetanov. Writing in a lengthy post on Instagram, Brudenell repeated royal commentator Ingrid Seward's famous quote about Meghan: "In the monarch's view, it was not appropriate for a divorcée getting remarried in church to look quite so flamboyantly virginal." Brudenell explained: "Not written about me but about Meghan, The Duchess of Sussex, needless to say when this article was flung in my face last week, I didn't bat an eyelid. "Seward wrote how the late Queen only revealed her opinion to her closest confidantes and the Queen's cousin Lady Elizabeth Anson, who is said to have been among those confidantes, apparently shared that Meghan's dress was improper – considering she had been married prior to Prince Harry. "Why was I unsurprised by reading this article? Because my mother, our late queen's god daughter, had said exactly the same to me. Other family members would agree, she said." Brudenell continued: "As I told my mother, we may as well just splash some muddy water, drip some blood, sweat and tears on it for good measure. "As it happens my dress did have a lot of unique components to it but these were because of what I chose and not in any way what I felt I must choose. My mother listened to my wisdom and respected my style. I am blessed to have had that freedom, the pressures on the immediate Royal family are extreme and we must pray for them." White wedding dresses first became popular during the reign of Queen Victoria, when in 1840, she was one of the first women to wear white on her special day. On May 19, 2018, Meghan wore a beautiful gown designed by Givenchy's Clare Waight Keller for her Windsor church wedding, before changing into a halter-neck dress that featured a daring open back by Stella McCartney for the reception. The royal wedding was Meghan's second marriage, as she was previously married to film producer Trevor Engelson between 2011 and 2014, with the pair separating two years before Meghan met Prince Harry.
New Statesman
an hour ago
- New Statesman
Beware the girlosphere
The word 'girlhood' is everywhere. But hearing it feels a bit like being flashed by a nudist. Nobody complains about Richard Linklater's film Boyhood; and 'childhood' is completely normal. As a young woman, I feel comfortable admitting I was recently a girl; but saying I had a 'girlhood' sounds bizarre. The feeling started to creep in around 2023, when the word came up as a fashion-industry descriptor – baby pink was legion and you couldn't move for fear of bumping into a hair bow. The online magazine Who What Wear collaged together some outfits by Miu Miu and Sandy Liang and used the headline 'How Celebrating Girlhood Quickly Became the Internet's Favourite Trend'; Dazed called the same thing 'Girlhood-core.' That year, director Sofia Coppola released a book of behind-the-scenes photos, bound in the same pastel pink, to her female fanbase. 'Bows, Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides, and the entirety of Lana Del Rey's discography are all things that were once shamed for enjoying, but have become core components of what makes up girlhood…' The look isn't new. But it found its creepy moniker as adults flocked to TikTok over the pandemic, bearing years of residual Internet detritus from the time when Tumblr held most of the alternative market share. For around fifteen years this exact amalgamation of whites and pinks, Nouvelle Vague hairstyles, Lana Del Rey videos and Sofia Coppola films has held currency wherever young women exist online. The nostalgic aesthetic is refined but has no single creator; its resounding motifs have been pinned, reblogged and retweeted until they became a universal online language. Welcome to the girlosphere, the least understood corner of the political internet. We are already familiar with journalistic fretting about the 'manosphere,' which shovels anti-feminist and white nationalist ideology from underground message boards onto increasingly visible parts of mainstream social media. Influencer Andrew Tate allegedly radicalises young men into misogyny, they say (though recent Ofcom research has found his reach might be overstated); Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson forms the more acceptable face of this loose digital grouping. More than any individual, the manosphere's standard bearer might be the green cartoon frog, Pepe, who presides over the digital basement of the alt-right. In May this year, Stephen Graham's smash Netflix show Adolescence took over the national conversation. The four-part series follows the Miller family after their 13-year-old son kills a female classmate. It's all about male rage, and online misogyny. 'Adolescence is such powerful TV,' the Guardian wrote, 'that it could save lives.' Now, secondary school pupils in England are to be taught about incel culture, and misogyny inherent to the so-called manosphere, according to statutory government guidance recently published by the Labour government. Less thought – almost none – is given to the opposite corner of the internet. We know all too well about the damage social media has wrought to a specific class of online adolescent women. Their rates of depression, anxiety, and self-injury surged in the early 2010s, as social-media platforms proliferated and expanded. Being in the 'girlosphere' puts you at personal risk. The current 'manosphere' panic revolves around a group of all-powerful influencers, who basically act like radio pundits; it seems frivolous by comparison to worry about how the internet looks. But young women do things online that men don't; they make moodboards, curate feeds, and live vicariously through 'aesthetic' images. In this case, the visuals themselves might be key. The girlosphere is broad enough to subsume any ideology without obvious cognitive dissonance. The beliefs that reach it become glamorous by association; it is aesthetically coherent but politically all over the place. It has no Andrew Tate; its only universal 'influencers' are enigmatic fictional characters, models and pop stars. Nine or ten years ago you could plausibly be a teenage Dworkinite and have all the same glittery pink images on your blog as a pro-porn liberal. 'Cottagecore', the vague grouping of unthreatening rural aesthetics that emerged in the dying days of Tumblr, accommodated both 'tradwives' and second-wave feminists. Today, pro-eating disorder images on X and Pinterest are made more palatable when they use suitably 'coquette' images of Slavic fashion models. Dangerous habits get embedded in the girlosphere at light speed; young women searching for escapism are at higher risk of getting sucked in. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe The fictional basis of the girlosphere has stayed the same for over a decade. It is deliberately voyeuristic and distant. Goodreads tells me that the Virgin Suicides gets tagged as 'girlhood' more than any other novel on the platform; the book and its film adaptation have had a cult online fanbase of young women for over a decade. But both are narrated by a cast of male characters; we barely see the central, insular group of sisters outside of dreams, rumours, windows and the 'coquette' craze on TikTok was borrowed wholesale from a decade-old Tumblr subculture, whose prime influence was the haunted paedophilia-Americana of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. If you're a young girl in this sphere then you're probably edgily imagining yourself as the abductee – but the whole point of the novel is that it obscures the abductor's criminal motivations through a veil of aesthetic-first literary devices. The manosphere, by contrast, is fundamentally anti-aesthetic. It puts its real-world grievances and ambitions before its visual concerns. Men do not participate in the collaborative collaging that made 'girlhood' into a nebulous vibe and Lana Del Rey into an all-purpose political tool. Nobody's living vicariously through the MS Paint cartoons of Pepe the Frog; Andrew Tate's livestreaming backgrounds have made no impression on the current generation of interior designers. You can write its acolytes off as political undesirables after a single glance. The girlosphere is a different kind of entity. There was nothing inherently malevolent about it in the beginning, but its escapist foundations have made it into a potentially sinister tool. Young women come to seek aesthetic pleasure and end up ricocheting over the political spectrum. The mainstream fashion devotees of the 'girlhood' aesthetic pose it as a symbol of reclaimed sisterhood, but this is the most sinister proposition of all, like something out of the Stepford Wives. It has only resounded for so long among young women online because its creepy voyeurism puts it at arm's length from the real female experience. You don't have to think with empathy when you mix modern-day policy and the vibes of a fictional middle America; you don't have to consider the practicalities of your own body when you spend all day collaging together old photos of Slavic supermodels. And once you enter the girlosophere, you can never leave. Future generations will have to endure this too: a ballet flat stomping on a human face, forever. [See more: On freedom vs motherhood] Related
Scotsman
11 hours ago
- Scotsman
What's On In Glasgow Today, Thursday, July 24? Here are 13 amazing things to do and see in the city
2 . See a classic on the big screen The Glasgow Film Theatre's current David Cronenberg season is proving hugely popular - with every single one of the Canadian auteur's films being screened in the coming months. This evening it's classic horror 'Dead Ringers', which sees Jeremy Irons plays twin gynecologists who are anything but professional. A tough watch to say the least, this is a rare opportunity to see it on the big screen - if your stomach can take it. It's screening at 8.20pm in the wonderful GFT1. | Contributed
