Scooter Braun On Managing Acts, And A Possible New Direction

By External Source

He helped Justin Bieber find God and Ariana Grande respond to the Manchester Arena attack, while having to keep tabs on Kanye West. Scooter Braun explains why managing pop stars is perfect training for politics.

Perfectly on time, Scooter Braun strides into a small, windowless room at Cannes’ Midem convention, the annual gathering of the world’s music business. For someone who has just flown in from the US, he looks remarkably good: suit and shirt perfect, no hint of jet lag. But these are good times, even by Braun’s standards. The man who once sold fake IDs at university could now reasonably claim to be the biggest manager in pop, with a personal fortune estimated at $23m (£17m), thanks to his involvement with the likes of Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber and Carly Rae Jepsen, as well as canny investments in Spotify, Uber and Dropbox. He has just announced the first film to come out of his studio, Mythos – an animated movie called Cupid, with Justin Bieber voicing the title character – and the founding of a reality TV company, GoodStory Entertainment.

His relationship with his most wayward artist, Kanye West, is back on, after a “rough” couple of weeks in which West fired him, apparently enraged at Braun’s refusal to get rid of all his other clients and work solely with him. West announced that he couldn’t be managed (Braun favourited the tweet) in a media rampage that also included doubling down on his support for Donald Trump and appearing on TMZ to suggest that slavery was “a choice”. A “manic moment”, suggests Braun, brought on by the rapper’s bipolar disorder. - Continue reading Alexis Petridis's feature in the Guardian UK