Taylor Swift was honored with the Billboard Woman of the Decade award at their Women in Music ceremony last night and didn’t hold back about Scooter Braun during her speech. The “We Are Never Getting Back Together” hitmaker was introduced by Jameela Jamil on stage and delivered a 15-minute speech.
Swift opened up about the experience she has gone through with Braun and addressed the “toxic male privilege” within the music industry.
“Lately, there has been a new shift that has affected me personally and that I feel is a potentially harmful force in our industry. And, as your resident loud person, I feel the need to bring it up,” she said.
“That is the unregulated world of private equity coming in and buying up our music as if it was real estate. As if it’s an app or a shoe line,” the “Shake It Off” chart-topper continued.
Swift expressed that this was done without her approval, consultation, or consent. After she was reportedly denied the chance to purchase her own music outright, her entire back catalog from the beginning of her career was then sold to Ithaca Holdings in a deal supposedly funded by the Soros family, 23 Capital, and the Carlyle Group.
“Scooter never contacted me or my team to discuss it prior to the sale or even when it was announced. I’m fairly certain he knew exactly how I would feel about it though.”
As previously reported by The Inquisitr, lots of celebrities stood with Swift after she originally took to Twitter to explain that Braun tried to stop her from performing her old songs at the American Music Awards last month.
Swift not only talked about the struggles she has faced as a female in the music industry but also took the time to show love to other current female artists. She stated that she believes Lana Del Rey is the most influential in pop and that her vocal style, lyrics, and aesthetics have been echoed and repurposed in every corner of recent music. Swift used Lana as an example of an artist who kept making art despite getting ruthlessly criticized at the beginning of her career. The “Teardrops On My Guitar” songstress noted that Lana had earned herself an Album of the Year nomination for next year’s Grammy Awards, proving that critics shouldn’t get the better of you.
She shouted out some other female artists who she feels are also unstoppable and forces to be reckoned with — Lizzo, Nina Nesbitt, Dua Lipa, Megan Thee Stallion, Normani, to name a few.
In a short amount of time, Swift’s speech has been watched over 165,000 times on Billboard’s official YouTube channel, proving to have made an impact very quickly.