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When Taylor Swift takes the stage at the American Music Awards on Nov. 24 to accept the Artist of the Decade award, her performance could be anything but career-spanning.
In a statement released on Tumblr last night, Swift said she won’t be able to perform songs from her first six albums because of pushback from Scott Borchetta, who’s the founder of her former label, Big Machine Records, and music industry mega-manager Scooter Braun.
“Scott Borchetta and Scooter Braun have now said that I’m not allowed to perform my old songs on television because they claim that would be re-recording my music before I’m allowed to next year,” she wrote.
In her Tumblr post, titled “Don’t know what else to do,” Swift said Borchetta and Braun are also blocking the use of any of older music or performance footage in an upcoming Netflix (NFLX) documentary about the singer’s life.
Big Machine refuted Swift’s claims. “As Taylor Swift’s partner for over a decade, we were shocked to see her Tumblr statements yesterday based on false information. At no point did we say Taylor could not perform on the AMAs or block her Netflix special. In fact, we do not have the right to keep her from performing live anywhere,” the company said in a statement.
Swift posted the statement as a call to her fans and to “several artists” managed by Braun with the hope to “talk some sense into the men who are exercising tyrannical control over someone who just wants to play the music she wrote,” she wrote. “I’m especially asking for help from The Carlyle Group, who put up money for the sale of my music to these two men.”
The singer-songwriter, who earned $185 million in 2018, according to Forbes, has said she lost the rights to the first six albums she recorded with Big Machine Label Group when Braun’s Ithaca Holdings purchased the label for $300 million in July, with financial backing by the Carlyle Group (CG), which took a minority stake in Ithaca in 2017.
The deal highlighted a major flaw in the music industry, one that seemingly leaves artists like Swift powerless over the works they’ve created. In traditional label deals, artists exchange the rights to the music recorded for the financial, publicity, and managerial support of a label.
Once an artist breaks off from a label, as Swift left BMLG in 2018, “the label retains control of sound recordings under that agreement. The artist’s work becomes the property of the label,” Larry Miller, director of the music business program at NYU’s Steinhardt School, previously told Yahoo Finance.
That structure hasn’t aged well with the advent of music streaming and artists’ ability to release music on their own time and terms, without the need for a label’s muscle.