Taylor Swift can perform whatever she wants at the American Music Awards
The show will go on for Taylor Swift on the American Music Awards this Sunday. Following a public dust-up concerning permission to perform her older material, the master rights to which are owned by Big Machine Label Group, the company (newly owned by Scooter Braun, who purchased it from Scott Borchetta) along with AMAs producers Dick Clark Productions on Monday announced that they have reached an agreement.
A statement provided to Variety reads:
“The Big Machine Label Group and Dick Clark Productions announce that they have come to terms on a licensing agreement that approves their artists’ performances to stream post show and for re-broadcast on mutually approved platforms. This includes the upcoming American Music Awards performances. It should be noted that recording artists do not need label approval for live performances on television or any other live media. Record label approval is only needed for contracted artists’ audio and visual recordings and in determining how those works are distributed.”
The detente follows last week’s Swift-Braun-Borchetta flare-up involving the sort of music business minutiae that doesn’t commonly interest the general public — the particulars of re-recording old masters. As it relates to the AMAs, an argument could be made that a West Coast broadcast of a live show is, technically, a taped version of a song.
Swift blasted Braun and Borchetta on social media, bringing the matter into the open and claiming that Big Machine threatened to also block her from using her older material in a forthcoming Netflix documentary.
Big Machine contended the opposite — that “since Taylor’s decision to leave Big Machine last fall, we have continued to honor all of her requests to license her catalog,” though it is unspecific to the AMAs or the doc. In the case of the latter, it stands to reason that original master recordings would be needed if she wanted to play portions of music from her first six albums.
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