celeb news Scooter on Taylor Again: "I was open to selling catalogs back at a fair market value"

[wastedpotential]

30 minutes ago, Severus Snape said:

 

 

Its the same as the Spotify situation 7 years ago. Its just an excuse for her to renegotiate contracts and stuff, yet still artists in Spotify haven't seen an improvement in their paychecks  no one benefited from her fight with Spotify other than herself, and also no one did from her letter to Apple Music. And it will happen the same with the re recordings, its only for personal benefit, never for a common wellness improvement. Thats why this re recordings have completely disengaged myself from her. (she could have given us vault tracks with re issues on the 10th anniversary of each album, new cover arts, etc.)

Now sis you're allowed to feel however you want to feel but this entire paragraph is just one misinformed lie after another. Because of her letter Apple Music now pays artists for streams from users during their free trial period (when they were not doing that before). That is a direct impact she has had on literally every single artist who has songs available for streaming on Apple Music. While Taylor putting her music back on Spotify didn't benefit artists directly, she did call attention to the fact that Spotify royalties are stupidly low paying for artists. However, when she signed to Republic, in her contract she stipulated that UMG (upon the sales of their shares in Spotify) must give some of the profits to artists as a non-recoupable check, regardless of how far they are in paying back advances. Both of those impact thousands of artists direct streams of income to some degree, and saying they had no impact and were just an excuse to "renegotiate contracts" for "personal benefit" is straight up false. 

 

We have no idea what the re-recordings will mean for artist's rights in the future given that they've just started happening, so making predictions about how they might or might not have impact on a lot of artists is foolish. There are already a few cases of new artists explicitly mentioning that because Taylor drew their attention to the issue, they fought with their labels to maintain control of their master recordings, and I think we'll see a lot more of that over the next few years. At the very least, Taylor's masters struggle called attention to an issue that most people really didn't know much about (or had forgotten about in the 35 years since Prince went through a similar thing). Just because they've been wildly successful doesn't mean they have no benefit to other artists.

 

Just say you're looking for a reason to hate her and disengage and go, no one is stopping you, but don't peddle lies and spread ignorance 

[Bey'Knight]

6 hours ago, BrokenMachine said:

Not him playing the victim again 

 

Even when it has been used sarcasticaly in here, this time is true: #BelieveWomen 

Where did he claim to be a victim? 
 

He admits how he would’ve done things differently given how it all plays out. I don’t buy that he was oblivious to Taylor’s perception of him but there is no self-victimisation in his quote. 
 

Do people just trot out phrases in a vacuum because it sounds like something that would fit the scenario? 

[Severus Snape]

4 minutes ago, wastedpotential said:

Now sis you're allowed to feel however you want to feel but this entire paragraph is just one misinformed lie after another. Because of her letter Apple Music now pays artists for streams from users during their free trial period (when they were not doing that before). That is a direct impact she has had on literally every single artist who has songs available for streaming on Apple Music. While Taylor putting her music back on Spotify didn't benefit artists directly, she did call attention to the fact that Spotify royalties are stupidly low paying for artists. However, when she signed to Republic, in her contract she stipulated that UMG (upon the sales of their shares in Spotify) must give some of the profits to artists as a non-recoupable check, regardless of how far they are in paying back advances. Both of those impact thousands of artists direct streams of income to some degree, and saying they had no impact and were just an excuse to "renegotiate contracts" for "personal benefit" is straight up false. 

 

We have no idea what the re-recordings will mean for artist's rights in the future given that they've just started happening, so making predictions about how they might or might not have impact on a lot of artists is foolish. There are already a few cases of new artists explicitly mentioning that because Taylor drew their attention to the issue, they fought with their labels to maintain control of their master recordings, and I think we'll see a lot more of that over the next few years. At the very least, Taylor's masters struggle called attention to an issue that most people really didn't know much about (or had forgotten about in the 35 years since Prince went through a similar thing). Just because they've been wildly successful doesn't mean they have no benefit to other artists.

 

Just say you're looking for a reason to hate her and disengage and go, no one is stopping you, but don't peddle lies and spread ignorance 

Fist of all the AM letter came just in time for when 1989 was due to being released on the platform, so she didn't want to be left unpaid and used all the ''independent artists'' as an excuse to force apple to pay her. This would have been fine if it had been an isolated issue, but its that she always fights for the least powerful only when she's also a beneficiary of the battle won.  How can you not see it? An independent artist, as she puts it, would not (and still are not) able to make a living out of AP+spotify streams alone bc of how many streams it takes to even make a dollar. It only makes her a significant amount of money and thats it. She didn't want to give 1989 for free to people and decided to jump in with the independent artists. 

 

Yet then again with the Spotify issue years ago, she decided to hold back her music on Spotify bc on that moment she wasn't doing as good as her competitors and saw most of her earnings through digital purchase anyways. Keep in mind that thats back in 2014 when streaming wasn't the biggest thing out there, so she didn't loose any money at all while protesting, It was only in 2017 when out of pettiness decided to release her catalog on Katys album release day. 2017 thats when she saw that digital sales were free falling and she released that streaming was the future and not a side venture anymore, so suddenly she looses her morals and ditches the ''independent artists'' straight away and jumps on the platform.

 

I just want you to see that its all on the framing that you see things. She only puts up a fight when her wallet is concerned, she's money motivated and the moment you realise that you will completely see her in a different light. I had been staning her for years and had no reason to ''unstan her'' bc I still like her musical output, but don't treat her like a saint bc she isn't one. That much fighting and see who is the top earner now, see how independent and small artist have benefited?? non

 

UMG doesn't have small artists, and I still have to see an UMG artist come up and say hey thanks to Taylor I now earn more. She's just wording and framing, i'm telling you. 

[JorgeM]

4 hours ago, RihFenty20 said:

Public image amongst whom? Her Stans? Anybody  who has *actual pull* in the industry does not care about any alleged underhand tactics because they all do the same thing. This doesn’t affect him in the slightest amongst the people that matter (his peers). 
 

EDIT: I missed the politics part but even that doesn’t really matter. People who have done a lot worse get elected and put into positions of power all the time. With the right amount of money, connections and timing. He will be fine, plus most of the public don’t know or care about this masters controversy. 

Amongs everyone, you can search who in 2017 he was one of the person who the democrats were pushing for California, and how now he is complete out of the race 

[JorgeM]

3 hours ago, RihFenty20 said:

Where did you get this information from? He’s not sued by Shamrock. His lawsuit has nothing to do with her music, it has to do with funds promised to raise but failed to provide to a business partner way before he even thought about buying her music. 
 

he allegedly made an upwards of 150 million from his sale of her work. In what way is that a bad business move?!? Lmaoo. Also I doubt that they are taking a major loss, if any at all, from the sale. For example, Spotify pays the record owners 60 percent of the revenue from streams and over 10M(or about 40 percent) of her streams are from works she doesn’t own. basically *every day* they’re making upwards of 25k from her work on just that one service.  And they’ll continue to make more money from her as she chooses to drag out the releases. 
 

 

We will see if he is finally sue or not. There are already articles about how Scooter lie and scam Shamrock, Who do you think is the the source?

[Headlock]

6 hours ago, Blade said:

Wow 2021 albums are outselling a 2020 and 2018 album. Love For Sale is a rerecording of 1930's songs

None will ever get close to ASIB's total units sold. 3M+ in the US and 10M+ WW.

Would you rather us cite Folklore, Evermore, and *checks notes* most of her old catalog? 

[Headlock]

1 hour ago, Severus Snape said:

Its the same as her Spotify battle back in the day, she just does it to renegotiate a better contract for herself and when she's done she gives up the '''''battle'''''. Since she has reintroduced her music on Spotify after her fight with them, no artist has seen an improvement on their paychecks, same with the Apple Music situation. Its just a way to do some marketing move to make her seem as a social warrior while making even more money. 

Both of these statements are wrong.

Artists being paid UMG's shares of Spotify should they sell is literally something she negotiated in her deal with Republic 

And she is literally the reason artists get paid royalties during free AM trials 

[Headlock]

25 minutes ago, Severus Snape said:

UMG doesn't have small artists,

Today I learned every single artist signed to all of these labels are big 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Universal_Music_Group_labels

[Severus Snape]

2 minutes ago, Headlock said:

Today I learned every single artist signed to all of these labels are big 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Universal_Music_Group_labels

depends on what you consider a small artist. Working with a label is always going to result un a positive number outcome for the artist since they are not the ones who do the investing and paying for things. Indie artists (who are the ones she highlighted in her AM letter) are at the bigger risk and the ones who still don't get paid enough on any platform. 

 

Its so nice to advocate for others when you are the one who is going to see a biggest monetary profit from the stunt. 

[Headlock]

3 minutes ago, Severus Snape said:

depends on what you consider a small artist.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

[wastedpotential]

18 minutes ago, Severus Snape said:

Fist of all the AM letter came just in time for when 1989 was due to being released on the platform, so she didn't want to be left unpaid and used all the ''independent artists'' as an excuse to force apple to pay her. This would have been fine if it had been an isolated issue, but its that she always fights for the least powerful only when she's also a beneficiary of the battle won.  How can you not see it? An independent artist, as she puts it, would not (and still are not) able to make a living out of AP+spotify streams alone bc of how many streams it takes to even make a dollar. It only makes her a significant amount of money and thats it. She didn't want to give 1989 for free to people and decided to jump in with the independent artists. 

 

Yet then again with the Spotify issue years ago, she decided to hold back her music on Spotify bc on that moment she wasn't doing as good as her competitors and saw most of her earnings through digital purchase anyways. Keep in mind that thats back in 2014 when streaming wasn't the biggest thing out there, so she didn't loose any money at all while protesting, It was only in 2017 when out of pettiness decided to release her catalog on Katys album release day. 2017 thats when she saw that digital sales were free falling and she released that streaming was the future and not a side venture anymore, so suddenly she looses her morals and ditches the ''independent artists'' straight away and jumps on the platform.

 

I just want you to see that its all on the framing that you see things. She only puts up a fight when her wallet is concerned, she's money motivated and the moment you realise that you will completely see her in a different light. I had been staning her for years and had no reason to ''unstan her'' bc I still like her musical output, but don't treat her like a saint bc she isn't one. That much fighting and see who is the top earner now, see how independent and small artist have benefited?? non

 

UMG doesn't have small artists, and I still have to see an UMG artist come up and say hey thanks to Taylor I now earn more. She's just wording and framing, i'm telling you. 

Let me take this line by line and explain where you've got this wrong. Yes, the Apple Music letter happened right before Taylor was about to put 1989 on the platform because it was in the week leading up to the launch of Apple Music in the first place  Maybe it was only for "personal reasons" (given we'll never know her personal rationale) but it directly lead to a bump in income for every single artist who has music on Apple Music and gets streams there. It is generally accepted that a small, independent artist will never be able to make money from streaming given the extremely tight profit margins (especially considering that Spotify was losing money for the first 8 years of its existence, they literally could not afford to pay higher rates), but they're certainly making more now from Apple Music than they otherwise would have solely because of what Taylor did. If you've read her letter to Apple Music, you can see clearly that she outlines how their free trial is basically robbery from every artist, and every artist made money from the following agreement. If she really just wanted to make the change for personal gain, she could've just said "Hey Apple, please don't let free trial users stream my music" and they would've obviously done that. 

 

The week it was removed from Spotify, Shake It Off was #1 on the streaming charts in basically every single market. It had been #1 in the US every single week since it was first put on the platform. When We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together was removed, it was one of the 15 most streamed songs of all time on the platform. She was doing better than her competitors. She had literally no financial reason to remove her back catalogue from Spotify since it wasn't exactly doing that well back then. The first few weeks of sales, I will grant you were more profitable off of streaming, but 1989 was down to 20k pure sales per week after a few months, at which point adding it onto Spotify would have been by far the most profitable thing to do. Pure sales had been falling for two decades straight at that point, so of course it was something she considered in the calculus. Instead she decided to take a stand against the platform and held everything off for years, until she reached a point where it was too big to ignore and she had firmly lost the battle against the free tier. At that point she could either start to work with them and try and get them to increase their royalties from the inside, or she could continue to protest by withholding her music, which had proven unsuccessful for years. Yes, the Katy thing was very, very petty but you can't say you weren't living for the drama just like the rest of us  The timing of that was obviously very shady, but it was less of her abandoning her morals and more of her realizing that what she had been trying was just flat out not working. 

 

It really looks like you're trying to scrounge up reasons to find her shady and "money motivated" here. That might be the case, but since we can't ask her that directly, we'll never know. Does it matter if her moves were money motivated when they've singlehandedly funneled more money from the streaming services and labels directly to the artists? As for the UMG thing, please take a look at the artists on the rosters of their hundreds of labels and tell me again they don't have small artists. Also, it would be really weird for some small artist to mention as a one off in an interview "hey, thanks Taylor for the extra money", but I'm certain at least a few have spoken to her privately about it  

 

Of course, as a fan who was very involved during that time, I might be biased toward one perspective on the issue over another, but I do not think it's fair to discount what she did for the industry as a whole just because it also benefitted her. Additionally, she has a limited amount of time and can only make so many changes to the industry as just one person.  I don't think it's fair to expect Taylor to fight for every single issue facing every single artist in the industry, when plenty of other big artists like Ariana, Drake, Bieber, Adele, Kanye, Rihanna, Ed etc have done very little or practically nothing to make things better for smaller artists. Of course she's not a saint and is someone who has made mistakes, but "oh no, Taylor made sure that she and a lot of other people got more money for their art" is not one of them  Taylor seems like a good person, but she isn't exclusively benevolent, just like I'm sure you aren't either. 

[wastedpotential]

15 minutes ago, Severus Snape said:

depends on what you consider a small artist. Working with a label is always going to result un a positive number outcome for the artist since they are not the ones who do the investing and paying for things. Indie artists (who are the ones she highlighted in her AM letter) are at the bigger risk and the ones who still don't get paid enough on any platform. 

 

Its so nice to advocate for others when you are the one who is going to see a biggest monetary profit from the stunt. 

Even this isn't true given that the biggest beneficiary of her fights with both platforms was Drake 

[slw84]

9 hours ago, Taeyong said:

I recommend watching the entire 2-minute clip.

 

 

"All artists have royalties coming to them from their masters and if they want an opportunity to buy them, they should have that opportunity and I'm completely open to that conversation.

 

I will also tell you though - to have that conversation, you have to have a conversation. You need to be able to sit in front of someone and have dialogue. What you can't do is say you want something and then never ever sit down at the table to have an actual dialogue.

And I wish everyone well, and in fact, what I learned from that experience was that I would never do a deal again where everyone wasn't involved in saying 'Yes, I agree with this deal.' I made the assumption. I made the assumption that everyone would be excited about us buying Big Machine. And that didn't come to be."

 

oh

[Brooklyn Baby]

40 minutes ago, InventedGays said:

This is such a dumb take. lol of course she'll benefit from musicians making more money from streaming services when she's one of them. Do you want her contracts & agreements to say "every artist on the platform except taylor gets these benefits"  whether it was for selfish reasons or not, which is something you'll never know about clearly already having your own made up opinions about her, it still benefited thousands of other artists. 

Clock em

[Michael196]

1 hour ago, Severus Snape said:

Fist of all the AM letter came just in time for when 1989 was due to being released on the platform, so she didn't want to be left unpaid and used all the ''independent artists'' as an excuse to force apple to pay her. 

 

Yet then again with the Spotify issue years ago, she decided to hold back her music on Spotify bc on that moment she wasn't doing as good as her competitors and saw most of her earnings through digital purchase anyways.

I didn't need to continue reading these paragraphs after reading the first sentence of each, and understand how misinformed you are...

three short points:

1. 1989 was released in 2014, AM launched on June 2015, and the letter things was a week earlier...

2. Shake It Off topped spotify from release until she took it off

3. it took time for her to put Red on spotify after release, which means that what she did later didn't come out of thin air.

[UnusualBoy]

He's still at it, at the end both "won" in one way to another.

[Desire]

The way some of y'all actually side with Scooter  

[Buffy]

9 hours ago, Taeyong said:

Yes he conveniently left that out 

 

Some people have 0 IQ in this thread and cannot read. Don’t expect the people supporting the ? to understand any of that. ? 

[taylamour]

Red (Taylor's Version) has a 91 on Metacritic. She literally won in the end...

[Jenlisa]

7 hours ago, MONSTER NAVY said:

do you honestly think i give 2 fucks what a person with a k pop avi has to say  

SCREAMING I was expecting this predictable asf reply  

 

3 hours ago, Cloröx said:

You can tell that this Masters fiasco has put a deep cut scar on his ego 

good 

[Harry]

she should buy it at clearance bin price after all the TV’s have been released

[BrokenMachine]

4 hours ago, Bey'Knight said:

Where did he claim to be a victim? 
 

He admits how he would’ve done things differently given how it all plays out. I don’t buy that he was oblivious to Taylor’s perception of him but there is no self-victimisation in his quote. 
 

Do people just trot out phrases in a vacuum because it sounds like something that would fit the scenario? 

This part right here. He basically says it to get sypathy, when we know the actual story is different than just 'asking everyone if they're happy'.

Quote

And I wish everyone well, and in fact, what I learned from that experience was that I would never do a deal again where everyone wasn't involved in saying 'Yes, I agree with this deal.' I made the assumption. I made the assumption that everyone would be excited about us buying Big Machine. And that didn't come to be.

He could have just sold the masters back to Taylor if it was that important to him, but no, he tried to control her music, wanted her to sign an NDA and sold her masters to someone else. Now he comes and says 'I would have done it differently now' as if it really matters

[More Than A Melody]

7 hours ago, mystery said:

I think Dua owns all of her masters, they are just licensed from her own company to Warner while she is signed to them. When she first got started her dad helped her set up everything to make sure she owns everything.

I hope so because it must be incredibly frustrating to have to deal with that and I feel deeply for all the artists that don't own them, which is most of them.

[Starchild]

Are some of y’all siding with scootbag ? not even kid LAROI wanted him and it isn’t even the Taylor thing, he’s been known for doing shady crap for a long while now 

[Squall]

11 hours ago, MONSTER NAVY said:

as per usual she had to go and play the victim card. Lol 

Another Rihanna stan being obsessed by Taylor, what is this fanbase's  problem?  

 

OT: Disgusting rat, he should just shut up.

Edited April 29, 2022 by Squall