Taylor Swift Claims Scott Borchetta and Scooter Braun Are Preventing Her From Performing... • Page 2

Whenever I see someone post something shitty on here, it's always someone I don't recognise. Makes me feel good that I don't share anything in common with them.

 

I don’t know who you are or where you come from. But you’re the only person that seems to make an ounce of sense around here.

 

Could someone give me an explanation as to why she wouldn't even be able to perform her old songs live? I understand the legal situation with the rights to her old recordings, but it's a live performance. How can a label or rights owner dictate which songs an artist can perform live? I've never heard of something like this happening, and I'm genuinely wondering how it's a thing.

Hopefully this doesn't come across as distasteful. I'm legitimately curious why she wouldn't even be able to perform her old songs.

 

It’s a debate over what gets classified as a re-recording when you’re dealing with a broadcast medium. I posted something about it in the dedicated Lover thread (where I get the distinct feeling I’m seen as a trespasser). Basically, a live broadcast can still be simultaneously recorded for retransmission purposes, and one could argue that falls within the restrictive covenant on re-recording in Swift's contract, depending on if it remained "fixed" for a non-transitory period of time. The Cablevision case from about a decade ago gets deep into this concept. It's not a home run, but it's a colorable argument that, by itself, wouldn't get you laughed out of court. That said, if the award show represents (or the parties just stipulate) that they won't be using any tech like that, it cuts the legs out from under the argument.

 

Thanks, that clears it up. So, to answer my question, it seems as if she can perform these songs in concert just fine, but if it's being broadcast or recording it fits the scope of this issue. Thanks for the explanation.

 

Because creating hurdles for someone to play songs they wrote and popularized themselves is morally unethical any way you look at it. Taylor swift is gonna be okay either way because she’s a gazillionaire with a lot more hits left to write, but siding with someone because they somehow acquired someone else’s art feels like an “well ackshualllyyyyy” take and no one has time for that.

 

Yeah that's not a call to doxxing nor are the fans doing any doxxing from what I can tell in the article.

More like an angry email campaign.

 

Fuck these dudes. Fuck this practice. Fuck people defending any of the above.

But most of all, fuck her business managers and lawyers.

You are one of a handful of artists in THE WORLD that move the needle. That move ~product~. That sells records. If your team was not able to leverage that into more control of your future, ten years ago, get a new team. I understand she was a minor at the time a lot of this was established, but someone has to be the smarter adult here.

We’ve seen this one already. Prince spent years famously fighting Sony Music over these issues. Artist lawyers should have this fight at the forefront of their minds as their artists get more and more successful. Leverage that.

A completely real situation that can and probably WILL happen, is before Adele delivers her next record or two, she will demand ownership of her masters for all past and future recordings. Sony will be forced to agree, as they want to maintain her as an artist for as long as they can. As they will also come to terms with making ~some~ money is better than making no money.

These artists do NOT need labels anymore. They are bigger than any label now. They have all the leverage. Fucking use it.

This won’t work for the 99%, but for the 1% we’re talking about here, it can and will.

 

I, for one, am devastated to find out that, hypothetically, two obscenely wealthy men might have to (temporarily) live in a hotel as a consequence of conspiring to profit off of a more talented woman’s labor.

It is truly a return to the inquisition that I cannot conceptually abide.

 

Can someone help me understand what she means by she cannot re-record copy cat versions of her songs? I don’t really follow what she is getting at there. Or is that where they are preventing her from playing a medley of old songs on the broadcast?

 

Oftentimes, after record deals are over with, bands/artists rerecord their biggest songs to try to gain more income from THOSE recordings than the originals that are still owned by the label. Everclear, Def Leppard, and many many others have done it. They hope the newest self-produced recordings will be the ones people stream or get licensed by tv/movies/commercials etc, as the bands’ rerecorded songs will usually come at a lower licensing price than what the label charges for the originals. For example, Stranger Things licenses a fair amount of the rerecorded songs because they’re cheaper.

This clause also pertains to live recorded performances, in certain cases. Some labels are a little more lax on it, evidently BMR are not one of those labels.

 

got it, that helps! I appreciate you taking the time to type that out

 

Not that people seem to care much about the details on this one, but the language of the press release announcing that the parties have reached a compromise is worth paying attention to. This wasn't a matter of Swift being forbidden from playing her songs or otherwise having to pay to play them. It was about Dick Clark Productions having to pay for the right to rerun the show after the initial live broadcast. Swift's public shaming of Braun and Borchetta was therefore more for DCP's benefit than her own. (Not that she doesn't have a pecuniary interest in collecting publishing royalties from said rebroadcast, but the live show was never threatened.)

 

Defending these men with legal arguments is completely missing the point. Especially when these kinds of contracts are made when artists were like 18, as if they're supposed to know better and totally aren't being taken advantage of by people whose whole careers is based around dealings like this.

 

So we don’t care that the fundamental premise of Swift’s call to action (“they’re not letting me play my songs” instead of “they’re asking DCP to pay a license for the rebroadcast rights”) may have been inaccurate or misleading. Any time someone exercises contractual rights regarding an artist who signed when young, it is inherently and automatically taking advantage of that artist, regardless of the details. It’s an interesting argument for labels to never sign a young artist ever again, but I don’t think that was your intent.

 

In other words, BM were, in fact, an obstacle to Taylor performing the songs that she desired and the public pressure caused them to cave.

Good.

 

Again, no, they were leveraging rebroadcast rights, not Swift’s ability to perform in the first place. But it’s abundantly clear that nobody cares about accuracy when there’s a clean good vs. evil narrative to be threaded by ignoring it (and that I’m apparently on the evil side just for wishing we’d talk about it accurately).

 

At this point, I assume this is some sort of performance art thing because no one is this dense.

But, in the event that it isn't, I'll indulge. You don't think that refusing to license the rebroadcast rights for those songs impacts what she would be able to play? You don't think DCP said to her "We would love for you to play a medley of your most famous songs, but we won't be able to put those performances up on YouTube if you do because of licensing issues related to BM."

To put it in a way that you might understand, you don't think that, given her "pecuniary interest in collecting publishing royalties from said rebroadcast," Big Machine was forcing her hand?

Of course it was. The choice was "play only new songs or you and your broadcast partner are going to have to forego certain revenue streams." This isn't difficult.

 

Of course BMLG was forcing Swift's hand regarding DCP's rebroadcast rights. But that's not what she said was happening. She said she wasn't going to be allowed to play the songs in the first place, which doesn't appear to have been accurate. Claiming to be blocked from even performing is a far more scandalous headline than a dispute over covered platforms, so I understand why she framed it the way she did, but she has a track record of these misrepresentations, and I don't get why so many people just ignore it for the sake of a clean narrative, or treat pointing it out as meaning I'm necessarily rooting against Swift. Not once in this thread have I claimed that Braun and Borchetta are the good guys, only that I (a) understand why they're playing hardball after Swift threatened to destroy the value of her back catalog just to spite them, and (b) don't think they (or anyone) deserve to be doxxed for such negotiation tactics. Them being gigantic assholes doesn't override this, but it seems it's always easier to just ignore nuance when inconvenient.

 

Does boot taste THAT good?

 

What an obnoxious and infantile response to a good-faith breakdown of my position.

Also, you say this like Swift isn't as powerful, if not more so, than Braun and Borchetta.

 

This is apparently still going, so I'm just gonna drop this here again:

At some point, just post a bunch of snake emojis or something 'cause this is painful to read and it bums me out.

 

Braun being a morally-compromised piece of shit (so stipulated for like the billionth time) has nothing to do with literally anything I've been trying to point out about the incorrect details of how this dispute has been reported, thinking people might be interested in that, but there's no point trying to have a targeted discussion with people who see even the mildest criticism of one side as full-throated support for the other. I've been Facebook friends with you for more than decade and a huge supporter of the website for even longer, so it's a bit shocking to see how little benefit of the doubt I've been given here with my positions being constantly perverted for the sake of snappy retorts, as if I'm some bad-faith rando shitposting with a burner account. Really disheartening overall.

 

Whoa, I didn't know you two were facebook friends. My bad.