Hers is truly a remarkable success story.
Taylor Swift was honored with the Woman of the Decade Award at Billboard’s Women in Music 2019 event at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles on Thursday.
Swift delivered a lengthy speech that touched on her career, sexism in the music industry, struggles she has endured due to being a woman, and how Scooter Braun has acquired her music catalog from her former label Big Machine Records:
“I saw that as a female in this industry some people will always have slight reservations about you. Whether you deserve to be there, whether your male producer or co-writer is the reason for your success or whether it was a savvy record label. It wasn’t. I saw that people love to explain away a woman’s success in the music industry and I saw something in me change due to this realization. This was the decade when I became a mirror from my detractors. Whatever they decided I couldn’t do, is exactly what I did.”
The singer then launched into how Braun’s Ithaca Holdings was unfairly able to purchase her catalogue without her approval, consultation or consent after she was denied the right to purchase the catalogue herself.
“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 and let me just say that the definition of the toxic male privilege in our industry is people saying, ‘but he’s always been nice to me,’ when I’m raising valid concerns about artists and their rights to own their music. And of course he’s nice to you – if you’re in this room, you have something he needs. The fact is that private equity is what enabled this man to think according to his own social media post that he could buy me, but I’m obviously not going willingly.”
Swift ended her speech on a note that summed up her decade:
“Lately I’ve been focusing less on doing what they say I can’t do and more on doing whatever the hell I want. Thank you for a magnificent, happy, free, confused, sometimes lonely, but mostly golden decade.”