Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
60 published records
01 / belief
“Disney. I think I have that right. He was the one who was kind of agitating on the board and the CEO transition if you've read The Ride of a Lifetime.”
02 / belief
“I think you could maybe argue there's also an element even bigger than that—the Obama thing.”
03 / uncertainty
“What Taylor’s sort of looking at is if we continue to put all our eggs in the streaming basket, I don't know.”
04 / evaluation
“If a record label signs a deal with you and they give you $500,000, well, it doesn't matter if your CDs are flying off the shelves or your Spotify streams are happening.”
05 / belief
“I think for Snap, but the idea was to build music into the discover tab that they owned or something.”
06 / belief
“I think the bigger reason she and other people don't do this is if you do go this path, you essentially have to build a whole full stack company around yourself, and that takes a lot of time and energy.”
07 / belief
“There's another one that's grading Shamrock's purchase of Taylor's masters and then there's a third one, which is, what price would you pay for those masters today? Which I think is sort of a fun one.”
08 / uncertainty
“I don't know what the failure rate is in the music industry, but when 90% plus of startups fail, well, you need some kind of economic splits so that the benefit of the winners that you bet on can more than make up for all of the losers that you bet on.”
09 / belief
“I think so. It actually used to be more. It's like 8 to 10, but it's come down in recent years.”
10 / belief
“The only place where this falls down—which I think is what I want to do this episode instead of value creation, value capture—is in order for this really to be fair, in order for these terms to truly be market price, you need the labels to not be making a ton of profit.”
11 / uncertainty
“Again, we don't know how much people knew this was going to happen beforehand, but here's the reality.”
12 / uncertainty
“I don't know if she exactly said we never talked, but she kind of implied like there was no agreement.”
13 / belief
“The majority of the outside capital though comes from—I don't think this has been talked about that much, this just blew my mind when I figured it out. I think I already told you who it comes from.”
14 / uncertainty
“To your point, you need people to answer the phones when somebody wants to use it in a commercial and have the relationships with the label, but probably, I don't know, 80%, 90% of your operating activities around the Taylor Swift aspect of your business now just disappear.”
15 / observation
“Today, people of all ages are paying for streaming every month from four-year-olds listening to stuff that four-year-olds listen to on Spotify, all the way to grandma having a Spotify subscription.”
16 / belief
“To my original point on the way that she tells her favorite version of the truth in some of these situations to create the largest impact, I think the savviest people in her audience could be spoken to in a little bit more of a nuanced way.”
17 / belief
“I think what I want to point out here is we've been on a pretty steady track to date where she releases a 15- to 20-song album every other year.”
18 / commitment
“I will take the episode off from telling you to become an LP this time to just say if you've always thought about it, but don't know what that sort of content is, that content is all public from the back catalog now.”
19 / belief
“I think people are so used to watching the standard path that they sort of assume that if you're one of the greatest of all time, but you're super young, well you should do what other super young people do.”
20 / commitment
“I will say, Reputation has some just amazing songs—Ready For It, I Did Something Bad, Look What You Made Me Do.”
21 / uncertainty
“Did they pick up the phone, call her, and say, do you want to make a bid? That, we don't know.”
22 / uncertainty
“I don't know if it's 20 employees, 15 employees, or something like that, but it's called 13 Management.”
23 / belief
“Swift's bestie, with his, I think, Divide Tour. But I think the Reputation tour—I'm going to get this wrong.”
24 / belief
“I think that's the only scale that we can really analyze this on. Anything else feels too small, of course.”
25 / belief
“A development deal is like we think you have potential, we're not ready to commit to a full record.”
26 / belief
“We actually would love it even more if you just share one-to-one with your friends because we think that strong connections are the best connections.”
27 / uncertainty
“We don't even have it substantiated that that screenshot that Big Machine decided to put out is real. But what we do know is that Big Machine was willing to let her have her masters from the first six albums if she signed with them again and we don't know what the terms were.”
28 / belief
“I think Shamrock and the Disney family are going to be left holding the bag on this investment that they'll never recoup, which is the great irony of Taylor Swift not recouping.”
29 / belief
“I think maybe even still before Tumblr or right around the time Tumblr's starting.”
30 / belief
“I think, definitionally, she also has switching costs because the CEO of Spotify, when she was not on Spotify, was flying to the US to negotiate for her to get back on.”
31 / belief
“I suspect what happened is that as soon as this change happened, all the dynamics we were talking about became evident.”
32 / belief
“I think for the first hour of it, I was just spending being in a state of shock that I was just hanging out in a room informally with the Beatles.”
33 / belief
“I think that male artists, bands, and the like can get away with not having to reinvent themselves for longer.”
34 / belief
“While they're living in the Caribbean, in Cuba and Puerto Rico—I believe Andrea was already born at this point in time—she decides that she wants to become a professional singer.”
35 / belief
“A lot of this stuff in this story is like a win-win-win for everyone, especially Taylor. I think that kind of keeps being the punch line.”
36 / belief
“Of course, she's going to make some money, but I think other people actually will be much larger recipients of the $750 million when it ultimately does get distributed.”
37 / belief
“Clearly, it's like both shots of their face looking down and Blue versus Red. I think the other one is probably referencing the LeAnn Rimes album.”
38 / commitment
“I will say, I also did the Peloton Taylor Swift (Taylor's Version) ride. On the 30-minute ride, 10 minutes of it is the 10-minute version of All Too Well.”
39 / observation
“Fast-forwarding all the way to today, UMGs owners are, of course, it's publicly traded, but Vivendi still owns 10% of it.”
40 / belief
“RCA tells Taylor they see what's going on and they're like, we do like your singing. We think you're a talented singer.”
41 / belief
“Valuable things should be paid for. It's my opinion that music should not be free and my prediction is that individual artists and their labels will someday decide when an album price point is.”
42 / belief
“Where did Kelly come up with this idea? It turns out that aside from being a great country artist herself, her mother-in-law at the time—I think she'd since gotten divorced—was Reba McEntire.”
43 / uncertainty
“Literally, in the video of the famous phone call, Rick Rubin, the famous producer is in the background. I don't know if he produced that song, but he was there.”
44 / belief
“Think back to 2008. If you lived in the UK, you could use Spotify, I think maybe Germany.”
45 / belief
“I think there are two levels to Taylor's objection here. One is, yeah, about the money.”
46 / uncertainty
“I don't know if it was in conjunction with doing this record deal or a little bit before a little bit after, but there's another transaction that happens between the Swift family and Big Machine.”
47 / belief
“I think we all know what happens next. It's kind of funny to talk about the Kanye andTaylor moment on Acquired, but this actually becomes such a huge part of the business story of Taylor's career.”
48 / belief
“There's some Rascal Flatts stuff and some others. I think there might be some Tim McGraw work that they have.”
49 / belief
“I think she's the Michael Ovitz too. There are so many ways that she leverages her self-appointed position as the music industry's resident loud person to beat up the centralized power and benefit the artists.”
50 / commitment
“In fact, that's the opening scene of Miss Americana when she gets the call that Reputation wasn't nominated and she immediately switches into this mode of saying, oh, okay, well, I will write a better album.”
51 / evaluation
“I think a lot of people know, in the music industry, streaming doesn't make the money, but things like touring do.”
52 / evaluation
“There are a couple of things about this album that I think is worth pointing out because she's more of an adult now and having real-world experiences, she is starting to shift her songwriting from being love songs and breakup songs about things that she may or may not have experienced that are sort of theoretical into I'm now doing autobiographical music.”
53 / evaluation
“I think the other is she genuinely, as he says in this piece, has an issue with people thinking that music should be free.”
54 / prediction
“I think everybody in the orbit on Team Taylor knew that this was going to be really big because Red was half pop, but it was really successful.”
55 / evaluation
“I think people liked it because all 17 of the tracks—14 on the main album and 3 bonus tracks—chart on the Billboard Hot 100.”
56 / evaluation
“Maybe this is part of the unsaid point in this Variety article is that Taylor is really one of the few artists, maybe the only one who could do that. That second point that you're mentioning, I think, applies to almost every artist, but literally, she made Apple change their policies in 24 hours.”
57 / evaluation
“Before Tesla, it wasn't cool—at least in Silicon Valley—to be a car person anymore. Everybody drove a Prius because like, I don't care about cars.”
58 / evaluation
“He's the wealthiest person I think under 30 in the world because he works in technology and started a cryptocurrency firm.”
59 / evaluation
“Or even let's say you're a retailer—and these don't matter as much anymore, but let's say you're selling CDs—for the indie artist who dealt with you individually, they can be the last check that you pay.”
60 / evaluation
“Because history has been so antagonistic between Big Machine and Taylor based on what would end up happening, which we will definitely get to, it is worth underscoring, she didn't have a record deal and this was a person who was willing to give her a record deal on an unproven artist.”