Scooter Braun has regrets over how he handled the Taylor Swift situation.
The 41-year-old music manager fell out with Taylor after he bought the rights to her masters and allegedly slapped her with restrictions on performing her hits live before he sold the rights on to the private equity company Shamrock Holdings.
Speaking on NPR show ‘The Limits With Jay Williams’, Scooter was asked: “When you bought the rights to Taylor Swift’s masters, it turned into a really big thing. If you could go back in time… Would you have handled it differently?”
Braun responded: “Yes, I would’ve. I learned an important lesson from that. I think a lot of things got lost in translation. I think that when you have a conflict with someone, it’s very hard to resolve it if you’re not willing to have a conversation.
“So the regret I have there is that I made the assumption that everyone, once the deal was done, was going to have a conversation with me, see my intent, see my character, and say ‘Great, let’s be in business together.’ I made that assumption with people that I didn’t know, and I learned… that I can never make that assumption again.
“In any conflict, you can say, ‘I didn’t do anything, It’s their fault!’. And you could be right, you could be justified. You could say, ‘This is unfair, I’m being treated unfairly,’ or you can say, ‘OK, I’m being treated unfairly. I don’t like how this is feeling. I can’t fix this, so how am I going to look at it and learn from it?’
“I didn’t appreciate how that all went down. I thought it was unfair. But I also understand, from the other side, they probably felt it was unfair, too. So I choose to look at it as a learning lesson, a growing lesson, and I wish everyone involved well. And I’m rooting for everyone to win because I don’t believe in rooting for people to lose.”