Taylor Swift - Lover (August 23, 2019) Album • Page 37

now that we've established how the industry works and how it is bad I think what we need is for someone to again explain how the industry works.

 

If you create art, you should own that art. Point blank. No exceptions. Anything else is a sham.

 

At the very. very least, if you have the means to buy back your masters, you should be able to do that - especially if you signed a contract with a label when you were a teenager.

 

Which is crazy considering Good Ol' Boys Club from Pageant Material completely calls out assholes like this and these practices. I mean there's even a clearly anti Big Machine line in there .

 

K, for the millionth time, in the millionth thread, your personal experience with a man exhibiting shitty and toxic behavior towards women does not negate what that woman is experiencing.

 

That’s great in theory, and I wish it worked that way. It may even be easier to achieve the in the music industry then certain other forms of art.

But artists sell their art and the rights to their art. The term starving artist is not an exaggeration for a majority.

Actors don’t own their movies or scenes.

I’ll stop now though because I’ve drifted off the topic.

 

This thread, the news thread, all seem to have the defense of telling us "this is how it works" -- like we don't know -- the point isn't that this is how it works so shut up and deal with it, the point is: it shouldn't work this way and could be way better for everyone.

 

People should be allowed to offer different perspectives.

Her talents are hers. But someone invested money in a 15 year old country singer to pay off one day and it did. He probably introduced her to the right producers, paid for videos, and gave her distribution. Otherwise, you never know if she has the opportunity to become as big as she has and meant so much to so many people.

Sucks for her though. Maybe the nice end to the story would be this Scooter selling Masters back at a fair value.

 

No one said differently, just said your "different perspective" sucks.

When you're ok with exploiting a 15 year old's talent and then give someone else the credit for their success.

 

Sums it up well.

 

exactly. Scott didn’t invest shit. BMR literally would not exist without Taylor.

 

I see K is being awful in yet another thread

Imagine siding with the music industry that shows no mercy and takes advantage of kids when they’re young. Incredible

 

First, this is about how Taylor feels. This is about her frustration as an artist and the power dynamics that even her immense privilege can't rise above - and it's about the evils of capitalism, whether she thinks of it that way or not.

Big Machine was nothing before Taylor, and he made comments in a radio interview last year that showed his ass and how bitter he was - how he wouldn't be beholden to her or something. I listened yesterday, but I can't find it today. Wish I'd made a note of it. I'll keep looking. But the bitter that jumped out made all of this that much more believable.

Borchetta has spent the the last couple of days trying to smear her - including saying she flaked on causes she has supported financially and putting up an out of context "clearing of the air" post through the label that didn't contradict what she said (that she was not given an option to straight up buy back her masters, end of sentence) yet was clearly framed to imply she was being dishonest when she was probably just being polite and trying to be an adult about things on her way out the door - if the text was real, that is. As one does. And so to find out someone she deeply dislikes and mistrusts and believes to have ill intentions is the person who ultimately was given the opportunity to buy her catalog, free and clear - yeah, that's gonna illicit a negative emotional response. Scott is a grown ass man who knew this, and did it anyway, allegedly "texting the night before" to claim that would've made the situation okay to begin with.

And the company he keeps? They're not exactly known for being champions of women. The emperor has no clothes.

Nothing about any of this is farfetched, and pretending it is because you hate Taylor Swift (which again, fine, whatever) does a disservice not just to women in music but to women everywhere. Powerful men BANK on misogyny filling in the blanks in the grey area they operate in - so it becomes he said she said, and the "he" tends to come out just fine in the end in these cases.

There is no reason to trust his intentions were noble. He's banking on the confirmation bias so many have about her - fine. That's good business. I believe her, because every woman in music alive knows a man who will use shit that was out of context - or a woman's good manners - against her to cover for his own crap. There's a playbook, and it hasn't been deviated from.

 

@Anna Acosta here’s that radio interview

 

Thank you! And I apologize to the thread at large if I restated anything that's been said since this whole thing started - I didn't have time to catch up before I wrote what I said apart from what's on this page.

 

Apologize? As usual, you spoke more eloquently than the rest of us.

 

I appreciate that, but it would still be incredibly rude if someone else had already spoken of the specific points I was making to just traipse in and not acknowledge it.

 

Well I tried having a nice dialogue. I don’t see the benefit of insults.

Also, her Dad obviously is/was part of the label, so I guess you could say he exploited his daughter twice as bad.

But I guess I suck and am exclusively
wrong. Sorry folks. Have a lovely evening and Happy Canada Day!

 

Whether or not you suck is entirely up to you. It's your responses and the things you're saying that suck (at least, according to the audience you've found in here. I'm sure there are other places on the internet that would agree with you and go five steps further). And for what it's worth, it's very difficult to have a "nice" dialogue with statements that uphold very problematic, exploitative and misogynistic status quos and traditions in this society - especially for those who personally suffer due to those traditions. And reverting to "I guess I just suck" is manipulative since it's a deliberate misinterpretation of what was said to you. So if you said it because you were legitimately flustered and didn't know what to say, this is me letting you know as gently as I can how that comes across. It's a statement designed to put the person you say it to on the defensive, because it paints them as a bad guy who was attacking you, instead of relating back to the actual disagreement at hand.

If you said it to be manipulative, then you might be accurately describing yourself with the last bit.

 

I feel like people who don't think these men are being deliberate and controlling af don't know men well enough. Men in power are petty and corrupt. There are so many cases of men in power trying to keep women in their place. I mean look what happened to Eliza dushku. CBS was so intent on being gross and writing her off a show for daring to speak up about a situation that made her uncomfortable that they ended up having to settle and pay her millions of dollars, and that's just a case we know about. Taylor made big machine what it is. If they had treated her with loyalty and respect who knows, maybe their relationship would've been strong enough that Taylor would've stayed with them and continued making them more money, but they can't handle someone telling them to shove it when they try their bs. Their need to control and put women in their place > even their desire for money.

 

It's one thing for a label to negotiate owning an artist's masters. I get it. It's in their best interest. But it shouldn't be the norm, because it allows labels like Big Machine to essentially hold their artists hostage or punish them for leaving, which is massive bullshit. And if you're not a big artist, they might drop you or choose not to re-sign you but still keep your shit. So if you ever want to do anything with those tracks again, be it a remaster or a vinyl pressing, you're SOL. I always think of what Butch Walker told me a few years back when I asked him about the possibility of getting some of his early records pressed on vinyl:

Taylor's catalog getting held hostage and sold to someone she hates as a means of revenge is the shittiest fucking thing in the world. The situation with Butch is less overtly/intentionally shitty, but it's still devastating for artists and also wildly more common. Even if the label doesn't think they can make any money off your masters, they'll still just sit on them and let them collect dust, rather than let the artist who wrote and created the songs have them and use them to do something cool for fans. Because most labels don't give a fuck about music fans, or artists, or music in general. They're just looking at their chess pieces and moving them around the board as they see fit. And if Taylor Swift, someone who could actually afford to buy back her masters and who would obviously have done so if given a fair shot, gets screwed by this system, then what chance to any other artists have? What precedent does that set?

I'm ranting, but suffice to say all this is why I don't understand how any music fan can side with the label here, or say "Well, that's just how it is." I get that labels invest in creating those masters, and that the cost of recording and producing an album professionally is very, very high. But labels are also getting the lion's share of royalties for those recordings. They shouldn't also be able to hold them in perpetuity.

 

How many bands own all their own masters?

I believe the only one that comes to mind for me is Face To Face. Trever Keith, front man of the band was trying acquire all the bands masters so he could reissue albums when he was starting up his own label, Antagonist Records. You could also do best of releases that way. I’m doubtful he let the bands he signed (which wasn’t many) own their masters though. Face to Face was also on a lot of labels over the years. Not sure if Fat Wreck owns the masters to Protection or who has any of their other material.

 

It's almost like guys like Scott Borchetta and Scooter Braun actually feel somewhat threatened and emasculated when a woman such as Taylor Swift acts confidently and assertively and doesn't just do everything that they say simply because they are men. If I didn't know any better I would say it almost looks like they purposely fucked her over in a very spiteful and hurtful yet perfectly legal and abiding by all previously signed contracts way, while also dragging her name through the mud and counting on ingrained misogynistic beliefs hard-baked into our society to shed a negative light on her when people fill in the blanks purposefully left vague when all of this gossip broke out.

As for the musicians owning their own masters thing - I think most people on these boards have at least passing knowledge about how the whole system works. Most people here are saying it's a bad system and should be done away with. Just because something has always been done in a bad way historically is not a good reason to keep doing it that way going forward.