Sounds like Scooter Braun wasn’t pleased that Kelly Clarkson suggested Taylor Swift re-record her albums

It’s almost hard to remember a world before Taylor’s Version, given how Taylor Swift’s re-recordings have dominated the charts and the cultural conversation for the past two years. But back in 2019, there was only the drama between Swift and her music industry nemesis Scooter Braun, who obtained ownership of her first six albums, and one well-timed tweet from Kelly Clarkson: “@taylorswift13 just a thought, U should go in & re-record all the songs that U don’t own the masters on exactly how U did them but put brand new art & some kind of incentive so fans will no longer buy the old versions.”

“I think Scooter took offense to it, because we ran into each other, and I think he reached out at the time to my manager,” Clarkson now reveals in an interview for Andy Cohen’s Radio Andy on SiriusXM. “I was like, ‘It wasn’t anything against him.’ When she came out and said that and I heard about it, I was like, ‘Whatever. Re-record them. Your fans will support you.’ Uh, they did. She has like every top record right now in the charts.”

“He called my manager at the time I heard, and I don’t know what happened or what was said, but I think he thought I was attacking him. I was like, ‘I honest to God didn’t even realize who had the [rights].’ I didn’t even know all the information,” Clarkson elaborated. “All I heard was, ‘Man, I really want to own,’ and I was like, ‘Man, that song… She writes everything. It’s so important to her. She’s a businesswoman.’ It felt wrong that she didn’t have the opportunity. Right? That’s the thing. If you have the opportunity and you choose to not pay that much money, that’s one thing, but to not have the opportunity to own something that is really important to you [is another].”

Whether Swift had the opportunity to purchase the masters for her first six albums is a bit more complicated than simply cutting a check. Before leaving her original record label Big Machine, she was supposedly offered a new contract in which she could earn back an old album by turning in a new album. “I walked away because I knew once I signed that contract, [former Big Machine owner] Scott Borchetta would sell the label, thereby selling me and my future,” Swift explained at the time.

Braun’s acquisition of Big Machine apparently blindsided Swift, who she viewed as an “incessant, manipulative bully.” Brian eventually sold the masters to private equity firm Shamrock Capital Content Fund; Swift said she declined the opportunity to purchase the masters from Braun because he wanted her to sign an NDA requiring that she no longer speak negatively about him publicly just to enter negotiations. “So, I would have to sign a document that would silence me forever before I could even have a chance to bid on my own work,” she wrote at the time. She also declined to partner with Shamrock Capital after learning Braun would still profit from her work after the sale.

Long story short—pardon the evermore pun—Swift went ahead and did just what Clarkson suggested, undermining the value of those old masters. “I knew it was important to her, so I thought, ‘Why don’t you just re-record them? Your fans will support you.’ Literally, she’s a genius. Not only did she re-record it, she planned this Eras Tour—like, this woman is brilliant,” Clarkson gushed to Cohen.

Clarkson doesn’t necessarily think she inspired the move: “She would’ve come up with that on her own and she maybe already had before I even tweeted it.” (Swift is not the only artist to have done so—lots of singers, from Frank Sinatra to JoJo, have done the same.) But if Clarkson’s tweet got under Braun’s skin, well, Taylor Swift would probably call that Karma.