Tom Dunne's Music & Me: Taylor Swift and when you wish upon a star
Taylor Swift at the Grammy Awards in 2008.
Well I’ll tell you one thing: I wouldn’t swap places with Taylor Swift for all the record breaking Spotify streams in the world. I may only have three gold disks, medium sales in a small market and a hard-won understanding of HiAce vans but at least the people I met in music were mostly decent! Unlike, well, you know who!
That said, if I’d been dependent on the income said ‘decent people’ had made for me from my music, I'd have been broke a long time ago. And, the one person I met who said he could get us a deal, nay could ‘guarantee us a deal’, without seeing or hearing us, had spent time in jail, but still: mostly decent skins.
This has not been Taylor’s experience. No, the men she has met, who have managed to get their hands on her music have not behaved entirely reasonably. She has fallen out with most of them, lawyers have been involved and harsh words spoken. But that said, they have helped make her fabulously wealthy.
They are not ‘men in suits'. You’d expect record company sharks to wear sharp suits, but that day has passed. Sharks don’t dress like sharks these days. They wear athleisure wear, like the rest of us. It’s expensive athleisure wear, but athleisure wear nonetheless.
Taylor’s first experience of a man so dressed was Scott Borchetta. He’d been an executive with DreamWorks but seeing a 15-year-old Taylor had decided to sell everything he owned to open his own label with Swift as its first signing. Oddly enough her dad did likewise, putting in $120K of his savings to a company specifically set up to ‘exploit’ his daughter’s talent!
Her debut, and every album since, have been triumphant. Who would have thought so many young girls would have loved pop-tinged country? Today she has sold over 200 million albums, is one of the best-selling artists of all time, has 10 Grammy Awards, seven Guinness world records and a net worth north of $365m.
But when Swift was reaching the end of her deal, Borchetta suggested he would let her have control of the masters – the original recordings of her albums - one at a time in return for six new albums. She didn’t like this and signed to Universal.
Braun's tale is one of eyewatering success. He is to money what she is to a killer hook. Dropping out of college at 19 to organise after show parties for Eminem he is now, at 39, in control of a media organisation worth about $500m. Don’t google him if you have self-esteem issues. He manages Ariana Grande, discovered Justin Bieber and has done deals for Kanye. And in 2019 he ‘acquired’ Taylor’s masters.
Taylor was incandescent, but it was to get uglier. Ahead of her AMA performance last year it was suggested Ithaca, Braun’s company, might stop her performing her old songs. The hashtag #ISTAND WITH TAYLOR was soon trending. They relented but it made Taylor determined to re-record her old albums, an act that would devalue the originals.
At which point Ithaca, also without consulting Taylor, sold her masters for $300 million to a company called Shamrock Holdings. I was very taken by the name. It suggested the kind of company that would acquire an estate in Leitrim from Nama before being name checked angrily on the Joe Duffy show.
It’s actually worse. It is a private equity firm that invests in radio and television stations and is known for aggressive strategies and hostile takeovers. It is owned, incredibly, by one Roy E Disney and yes your suspicions are correct: He is the son of Walt Disney.
It would appear that when you wish upon a star, you should get immediate legal advice, and lots of it. The family that gave us some of the greatest fairytale endings of all time does not itself do fairy tale endings. Swift, no doubt, grew up watching these fairytales, strumming her guitar and thinking: ‘One day when I grow up, mine will be the life of a princess.’ And she got so close.
