“I’m being myself when the camera is rolling.”
― Scott Borchetta
“Relationships feed on credibility, honesty, and consistency.”
― Scott Borchetta
“If you stand for something, that means there are going to be people who support you and people who don’t support you.”
― Scott Borchetta
“Every day is an adventure, and no two days are ever alike.”
― Scott Borchetta
“You’ve got to believe in yourself.”
― Scott Borchetta
“I grew up in the San Fernando Valley of Southern California in the 1970s. My friends and I were into bicycle motocross and into skateboarding in empty swimming pools. Those activities shaped my generation.”
― Scott Borchetta
“The reality of recording, it’s one of the most intimate things that an artist ever does because if you do it right, you’re exposing yourself, and you’re expressing your emotions, and those are the key attributes to a big record that really connect with people.”
― Scott Borchetta
“The world isn’t all happy, shiny people, and great art doesn’t come from vanilla. Great art comes from people with a point of view and are very passionate.”
― Scott Borchetta
“It never gets easier to break a new act.”
― Scott Borchetta
“There is no way to keep your thumb on the pulse unless you have your thumb on the pulse, and I think we have it.”
― Scott Borchetta
“In 1985, I went to work for MTM Records, Mary Tyler Moore’s Nashville record label, and stayed three years. After that, I spent two years as an independent promoter, then worked for MCA Nashville Records, DreamWorks Nashville, and Universal Music Nashville.”
― Scott Borchetta
“It’s just part of my DNA. I love racing.”
― Scott Borchetta
“Something that I’ve told all of my young artists is, there are going to be haters. You’re going to read things that are going to hurt you. It’s not going to make any sense. Just know that it’s out there and that it’s really easy to just press ‘delete.’”
― Scott Borchetta
“You can have all personality in the world, the looks, etc., but if you don’t have the songs, it doesn’t close the deal.”
― Scott Borchetta
“If you think back to the beginning of the label, we knew we had to strike quickly and aggressively and go for the brass ring.”
― Scott Borchetta
“Auto racing has been a big part of my life since I was very young. When the car feels right, it’s like, ‘We’ve got a big machine.’”
― Scott Borchetta
“For the label to grow, it has to have great executives who understand the culture, understand the mission, and can lead. I don’t want to be part of every decision.”
― Scott Borchetta
“Part of the mission of Nash Icon is taking away some of the day-to-day, hand-to-hand combat that you have to do to continue the mainstream country-radio relationship.”
― Scott Borchetta
“The nicest thing that my friends who’ve known me for 15 or 20 years say to me is, ‘Man, it’s crazy that you’re the same guy.’ It’s like, ‘Which guy did you expect me to be?’”
― Scott Borchetta
“It’s such a loud world out there, so it’s important to be able to be ubiquitous across formats.”
― Scott Borchetta
“It doesn’t matter if it’s social media or radio media or television media – it’s all media, and it’s all marketing. It’s about understanding where your fans are. And when you have infiltrated them, and they’re satisfied, and there’s demand, how do you grow it from there?”
― Scott Borchetta
“I think when we do our job right, our artists don’t sound like anybody else. I have a real hard time with voices that sound like other big voices.”
― Scott Borchetta
“I don’t want to worry about someone calling me and going, ‘You better find a way to get another Taylor Swift record out this quarter.’ When there’s that kind of financial pressure dictating your path, it’s hard to take creative risks.”
― Scott Borchetta
“I go by the rule of Gretzky: you gotta be there before the puck gets there, or you’re going to get beat.”
― Scott Borchetta
“Season 1 of CTV’s ‘The Launch’ exceeded our wildest expectations!”
― Scott Borchetta
“If we don’t have great music, we’re not any company.”
― Scott Borchetta
“What’s on the edge? What’s next? That’s where I think I do my best work – if I push my whole team to the edge.”
― Scott Borchetta
“There’s no reason people should be hungry in our country. It’s not acceptable.”
― Scott Borchetta
“The last thing we want is for radio to say that they can’t afford to play our artists and turn off the pipe.”
― Scott Borchetta
“My father was in record promotion in Los Angeles. He worked for Mercury Records, Capitol Records, and RCA Records. My parents divorced when I was about 9. In 1978, my dad moved to Nashville and opened an independent record promotion company, Mike Borchetta Promotions.”
― Scott Borchetta
“I attended College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita, Calif., for a year, but college wasn’t for me. I was curious about life beyond Los Angeles.”
― Scott Borchetta
“When you break an artist, you learn a lot.”
― Scott Borchetta
“I grew up in Southern California, so there is just a part of me that is a Hollywood rocker.”
― Scott Borchetta
“When I started the label, I stopped racing. Even though I have a better chance of getting hurt walking outside and falling down the stairs, if I had gotten injured on the racetrack, people would be going, ‘What is this guy doing?’ So I had to grow up a little bit.”
― Scott Borchetta
“I’m not a politically correct person.”
― Scott Borchetta
“You have to be responsible to yourself… but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a point of view about something.”
― Scott Borchetta
“A lot of times in a record company environment, it’s, ‘All right, go out on the road, go get some experience, come back in six months, and we’ll see where we are.’ I’ve erased that. Now it’s, ‘This is what we’re working on today. I expect you to come in tomorrow and address this and be better.’”
― Scott Borchetta
“Without naming names, you can take some of the biggest artists of the last 25-30 years and point to those moments where they thought they were going to be movie stars, put the entire weight of a film on their back, and it failed. And some of them didn’t recover from that.”
― Scott Borchetta
“Can a label group by itself scale to make a sensible business? I don’t think so.”
― Scott Borchetta
“When we grew up, we couldn’t wait to get our hands on cars, work with them, change the look of them. Now you see kids being like, ‘I’ll just take the Uber,’ or ‘Oh, I don’t even have my driver’s license yet.’ I’m like, ‘Ugh, who are you people?’”
― Scott Borchetta
“Winning ‘American Idol’ really anoints you the opportunity to have a great career; it does not anoint you a career.”
― Scott Borchetta
“You can come after me all day long. I don’t care.”
― Scott Borchetta
“So much time and attention has been spent on streaming that we’ve really gotten away from some of the things that we could have, energywise, put into working together with radio more closely for terrestrial.”
― Scott Borchetta
“Like everything at Big Machine Label Group, the music comes out when it’s ready.”
― Scott Borchetta
“It’s a rare opportunity when you can do something for the greater good.”
― Scott Borchetta
“With the launch of Big Machine Premium Vodka, we are now offering a superior product that perfectly complements the music we take such great pride in.”
― Scott Borchetta
“Some people are just gifted with a great voice, other people are gifted with great emotion, other people are gifted with great engagement – when you find all of those things in one package, you have Taylor Swift.”
― Scott Borchetta
“We have a mantra at the Big Machine Label Group: Start with crazy and work backward.”
― Scott Borchetta
“We came up with all these crazy ideas that Taylor Swift could be the biggest artist in the world – and it came true – and that we could have five labels and become the biggest independent record company in the world – and it came true.”
― Scott Borchetta
“I’ve always thought we’ve done our best work when everything is on the line.”
― Scott Borchetta
“We decided when we were building Big Machine that we wanted to be a Harley or a Ferrari.”
― Scott Borchetta
“Most of our artists are songwriters, so the songs are still central to all this. If you don’t have great songs, it doesn’t matter the marketing or how many times you are on TV; you can only polish it so much.”
― Scott Borchetta
“When we first started, I had the time to personally live every project. As I continue to build the company, I’ve learned much better ways to delegate and let the executive team run. It’s just as exciting for me to see the executives succeed as it is the artists.”
― Scott Borchetta
“I don’t know that you can set out to be a brand. For us, it happened very organically, and we never rushed it or leaned on it too hard. I felt a true culture had started to emerge several years into the Machine, so we started trying some things, starting with simple stuff like cool merch.”
― Scott Borchetta
“The Big Machine Label Group will continue to knock down doors to break female talent.”
― Scott Borchetta
“Sirius and XM went on air in 2001. It’s taken 14 years for that to be a real business. It took them combining to be a real business.”
― Scott Borchetta
“I’ve had so many conversations with new artists trying to figure out their careers.”
― Scott Borchetta
“The facts show that the music industry was much better off before Spotify hit these shores.”
― Scott Borchetta
“I’ve always thought that I’ve had a nice gift for putting the right people together.”
― Scott Borchetta
“I’m not a ‘practicing’ musician anymore. I played bass and guitar. I still pick up a guitar around the house every once in awhile.”
― Scott Borchetta
“I learned that you could beat the big guys with desire, passion, and hard work.”
― Scott Borchetta
“If you look at most of our roster, we’ve got great singer/songwriters. I’m always attracted to that.”
― Scott Borchetta
“Because we are Nashville-based and predominately a country label, people obviously think of us in that way, and that’s fine.”
― Scott Borchetta
“I grew up in Southern California. I played in rock bands out here, and I’ve been around pop music my whole life. I’ve been around all music my entire life.”
― Scott Borchetta
“Are there a million people out there who would love a Joey Cook album? I think there probably are.”
― Scott Borchetta
“The camera is the gatekeeper to the audience that’s watching you.”
― Scott Borchetta
“As an artist development platform, we’ve proven that all the work done behind the scenes at American Idol, along with surviving the rigors of the intense live shows, can properly prepare a winner for a real-world music career opportunity.”
― Scott Borchetta
“There are a lot of similarities, even though we’re in two different businesses: There’s the Taylor Swift business and the Big Machine Label Group business, but there’s a huge intersection there. When we’re together, it’s limitless.”
― Scott Borchetta
“Our entire goal is to make something that moves you… if you don’t want to call it country, I don’t care. That doesn’t matter to me.”
― Scott Borchetta
“The end game is always a hit song.”
― Scott Borchetta
“We’re a content company. And if we create the best content, every distributor will want what we have.”
― Scott Borchetta
“We try to stay on the edge of the mainstream and look at what the most aggressive young kids are running toward.”
― Scott Borchetta
“If you listen, people will tell you exactly what they want – whether it’s a business relationship or a consumer relationship.”
― Scott Borchetta
“I learned a long time ago, Don’t ever doubt the power of Taylor Swift.”
― Scott Borchetta
“When we signed Taylor Swift, people said, ‘You’re signing a 15-year-old female country artist? Good luck!’”
― Scott Borchetta
“Our focus is still on country, but, really, on whatever music our artists are making.”
― Scott Borchetta
“We’re not too top heavy with executives. I don’t have to check with New York or L.A. My crew walks in, we talk about something, and either we do it or we don’t. There’s not a long, drawn out process.”
― Scott Borchetta
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