I’ll be honest: we should’ve known Scooter Braun was going to be a problem from the moment he arrived on the scene in the 2010s. From his name to his aesthetic, the dude gives villain from the Incredibles movie. But despite those Disneyfied warning signs, Scooter took on some of the biggest names in the pop music scene as clients (including, of course, Disney stars) like Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, and Demi Lovato. That is, until his empire came crashing down after his clash with Taylor Swift in 2019, and soon after, Scooter was dumped by most of his roster of former child stars. Now, about half a decade later, Scooter has come back with a vengeance to yip yap about the ones that got away, a.k.a. the young and vulnerable musicians who famously struggled under the spotlight while being managed by Scooter. Here are Scooter Braun’s comments about “guilt” over his past working with “young artists.”
Scooter Braun Speaks About Working With Young Artists
Scooter Braun explained: “At this age, I feel a lot of guilt because I worked with so many young artists,” but “I hadn’t taken the time to look at myself or do the therapy myself until I was older,” on The Diary of a CEO podcast. According to Scooter, he “didn’t understand at 25, 27, 30 years old that they were coming from very unique backgrounds of their own stuff with their own families and their own childhood growing up this way and being seen by the whole world and being judged by the whole world at a very young age.”
Ahh, yes, the childlike age of 30 years old, which, for the record, Scooter was older than that when he was managing Justin through the height of Justin’s overexposed era as a teenager around 2016, also when he signed Ariana in 2013, and when he signed Demi in 2019, following her near-fatal overdose.
Though Scooter implies that he now understands the pressure his artists were under, being put to work while under a microscope, he then went on to do a little casual victim-blaming?? “I think human beings are not made to be worshiped. I think we’re made to serve, and I think that when we worship human beings, it changes something within us, it messes us up a little bit,” Scooter said, presumably speaking of the stars he profited off of while the world worshiped.
But Scooter added that his former clients’ “being able to transcend the childhood of people cheering your name and everything else at that level” to now have “healthy relationships and with their families” while “still working through stuff ” is “a testament to their strength.” Agreed, bruh, but a formal apology for your role in their journey would’ve been a super strong move here, too.
Scooter Braun Was “Shocked” By Taylor Swift Beef
If you somehow missed it when Scooter Braun bought the label Big Machine that, then owned the rights to Taylor’s first six albums among many other artists’ projects, shit went majorly left. Taylor took to Tumblr (lolz) to express how “grossed out” she was by his “incessant, manipulative bullying.” Now, Scooter is (sort of) sharing his side.
“When I bought Big Machine, I thought I was going to work with all the artists on Big Machine. I thought it was going to be an exciting thing,” Scooter explained. The record executive said that he knew Taylor probs wasn’t his biggest fan because of his close relationships with clients Kanye West and Justin Bieber (not her favorite people), but he “thought that once this announcement happened, she would talk to me, see who I am, and we would work together,” so he planned to give her a friendly call to smooth everything over after the Big Machine announcement, a plan he now sees was probably a bit arrogant.
While the fact of the matter is Taylor didn’t previously own her masters by her own choice, whether Scooter bought Big Machine or not, it is more than a little delulu that he didn’t try contacting her privately before the news got out if he wanted to start a fresh new working relationship. I guess because Taylor had “invited [Scooter] to a private party” and he was under the impression there was mutual respect, he was blindsided by the “deeply unfair” attack from Taylor and her trolls online. Wrong!
Overall, Scooter pulled the classic ~this was so many years ago, so I don’t need to talk about it~ to change the topic. Still, he did add that the experience gave him “empathy for the people [he] worked with” when they were going through a crisis on a “global stage” because he never understood before. Why dudes are constantly explaining they can only have empathy when something happens to them (I-didn’t-get-it-until-I-had-a-daughter ass energy) is beyond me.
Scooter said the Taylor debacle also taught him that “all the praise [he] had received up until that moment was not deserved, and all the hate [he] got after that moment was not deserved because none of these people knew me. She didn’t know me.” Damn, dude sounds like he’s in a bigger existential crisis than me.
