Scooter Braun has opened up about the “guilt” he’s reeling from his long-standing career as a former artist manager.
During a recent interview on The Diary of a CEO, the former music manager admitted he feels guilty because he previously worked with a lot of young up-and-coming artists who had to grapple “being judged by the whole world at a very young age.”
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“At this age, I feel a lot of guilt because I worked with so many young artists,” he said. “I hadn’t taken the time to look at myself or do the therapy myself until I was older, so I 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.”
Most notably, he managed Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber during the rise of their careers. In 2008, he began working with Bieber when he was 13, and Grande in 2013 when she was roughly 20. Both artists parted ways with Braun in the early 2020s.
Braun elaborated on the pressures of young stardom, noting that “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.”
“That’s not what we’re built for, and I think it can be very confusing,” Braun added. “And I think being able to transcend the childhood of people cheering your name and everything else at that level and get to a place where the artists I’ve worked with are where they are in healthy relationships and with their families and still working through stuff but having a human experience, I think it’s a testament to their strength and I think that’s part of it.”
The Hybe CEO also addressed his feud with Taylor Swift, which sparked after he acquired Big Machine Records and, with the acquisition, her catalog of master recordings in 2019. Braun said, “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 like an exciting thing. I knew that Taylor, she and I had only met three or four times, and one of the times it was years earlier and it was a really great engagement. She invited me to a private party and we respected each other. We had a great engagement in between that time,” he explained. “Since I’d seen her last, I started managing Kanye West, I managed Justin Bieber, I knew she didn’t get along with them. I had a feeling, this is where my arrogance came in, I had a feeling she probably didn’t like me because I managed them, but I thought once this announcement happened, she would talk to me, see who I am and we would work together.”
Braun recalled the moment he saw Swift’s Tumblr post where she said learning he had control of her catalog was her “worst case scenario” after “incessant, manipulative bullying I’ve received at his hands for years.”
“I was just like shocked,” he said. “It’s been five, six years, I don’t need to go back into it, but what I can tell you is everything in life is a gift, having that experience allows me to have empathy for the people I worked with who I would always say, ‘Yeah, I understand,’ but I never knew what it was like to be on the global stage like that. I never knew what criticism felt like.”
His interview comes a few weeks after Swift bought back her catalog for her first six albums in a deal with Shamrock Capital. The original sale, which saw Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings buy Big Machine Label Group, took place in June 2019 and led the Grammy winner to re-record and release all but two of her initial six records.
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