Taylor Swift was honored as the Woman Of The Decade at the Billboard Women In Music event on Thursday night in Los Angeles. She took her speech as an opportunity to publicly address Scooter Braun, who she has been feuding with over the last few months over the rights to her master recordings.
“Lately there’s been a new shift that has affected me personally, and as your resident loud person, I feel like I need to bring it up,” Swift said according to Billboard. “And that’s the unregulated world of private equity and people buying up your music … like it’s a shoe line.”
“This just happened to me without my approval, consultation, or consent,” Swift continued (via Pitchfork). “After I was denied the chance to purchase my music outright, my entire catalog was sold to Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings in a deal that I’m told was funded by the Soros family, 23 Capital, and that Carlyle Group.”
She went on to say that “the definition of the toxic male privilege in this industry is people saying ‘but he’s always been nice to me’ when I’m raising valid concerns about artists and their right to own their music” in reference to Braun. “And of course he’s nice to you,” she said. “If you’re in this room, you have something he needs.”
Here’s a clip from that part of the speech:
Elsewhere in the speech, she shouted out Lana Del Rey as “the most influential person in pop,” and went on to name a bunch of other artists that she liked that she thinks are pushing pop forward.