Scooter Braun wants you to know this — he was not drunk when he discovered Justin Bieber.
No, he was “very much sober” three years ago when he came home from a bar one night and accidentally clicked on a YouTube video that changed his life.
He once joked on-air about the dumb-luck absurdity of his coming home drunk and discovering “the next Justin Timberlake.” That, he swears, was an exaggeration.
“All my friends will tell you, I nurse a beer,” Braun adds. “My best friend has maybe seen me drunk three times in my life.”
Scooter Braun is a show-biz macher for the Internet age. He finds raw talent and scratches and claws his way in the door. It’s an M.O. so effective some of the biggest names in the record game think he might become “one of the greats.”
And it might seem like it all started with little Justin Bieber posting a YouTube video of himself singing an Usher song, but really it started with Braun turning nothing into something.
Scooter Braun, after all, is a nice, Jewish boy from Greenwich, Conn., the son of two dentists, who grew up in a big house with a big family. He has two younger siblings and two brothers his parents adopted from Mozambique.
At Greenwich High School, classmates crowned Braun, now 29, homecoming prince and “he was the first person to be class president three years in a row,” his father, Dr. Ervin Braun, proudly points out.
“He was always kind of a big man on campus. He had a very hot profile,” says one high school classmate. “He was always doing stuff — making moves, planning parties. And he always had pretty girlfriends, lots of them.” (His current girlfriend, with whom Braun says he’s in love but refuses to name, was mistakenly described as Bieber’s love interest on a gossip TV show.)
Some of Braun’s friends roll their eyes when they hear him called Scooter. Back in the day, he was just Scott. His younger brother, Adam, used to tease him with the name, but Braun decided to reinvent himself as Scooter when he enrolled at Atlanta’s Emory University. He says it’s because he made a $100 bet with a friend that he could get everyone to call him Scooter by his second semester. He also “realized that Scooter was a good name for marketing.”
“Scott hated the nickname. We fought whenever I called him Scooter,” Adam says. “It’s kind of strange that I was the one who gave him the name, and now I’m one of the few people who still know him as Scott.”
As Scooter, Braun spent most of his time promoting parties that eventually earned him thousands of dollars per night. And his name wasn’t the only thing that had changed.
He told his party posse, which included hip-hop producer Jermaine Dupri and Ludacris manager Chaka Zulu, that he grew up in Queens in an attempt to distance himself from his privileged Greenwich roots. (Braun has since come to terms with his Connecticut past; his main cellphone number is still in the 203 area code.)
Impressed with Scooter’s party-throwing prowess, Dupri offered the college kid a marketing internship at his Atlanta-based So So Def Recordings, which led to a full-time job as executive director of marketing. Braun bailed out of Emory to immerse himself in the music biz, and now he drops stories about the first time he flew on Dupri’s private jet.
In 2005, Braun set out on his own to form SB Projects. “When I left So So Def, I lined up that Ludacris deal,” Braun says, referring to a $10 million collaboration between Ludacris and Pontiac. The rapper agreed to feature Pontiacs in his video for “Two Miles an Hour” and the song would play in Pontiac commercials.
After calling GM pretending to be a student reporter to get more info on their advertising, Braun managed to get the right person to hear his pitch, and the idea was sold.
“He’s always moving a mile a minute, and you never know if it’s a real opportunity or an opportunity of the minute, and then he’s moving on to something new,” says family friend Brad Haugen, 28, who Braun recently hired as head of digital strategy.
The next notch in Braun’s belt was Asher Roth, a rapper who scored a Top 20 hit with “I Love College.” Braun signed Roth while the artist was still in college after, yes, finding him on the Internet.
A handful of months later, Braun found Bieber. He reached out to another Atlanta party regular, R&B star Usher, and also managed to contact Justin Timberlake. The two crooners got into a bidding war over who would produce the youth’s first record. Usher won and arranged for Bieber to sign with LA Reid, chairman of Island Def Jam.
While powerful music-world figures assisted in his rise, Braun sees himself as a maverick. “I’ve always done things my own way,” he says. “I’ve never really had a mentor.”
Well, what about Usher?
“Usher’s not my mentor — Usher’s my peer,” he says. “We draw off each other because we’re peers. LA Reid and I draw off each other.”
But Reid, 54, who says Braun will be “one of the greats,” doesn’t yet consider Braun an equal.
“Are you kidding me?” Reid says incredulously. “He’s 29 years old and he’s brilliant and I want to groom him. But it’s not quite old enough to be my peer.”
Haugen says Braun’s cockiness pays off. He describes a meeting Braun had with Coke last week.
“When we took the meeting, they were a bit hesitant because of Justin’s demographic’s age,” Haugen says. “Scott just walked into that room and he is basically telling them that Justin is ‘it.’ He just commanded the room.”
Perhaps Braun can be so forceful on behalf of Bieber, 16, and Roth, 24, because he considers them more than clients. They’re family. And Braun is fiercely loyal to his family; he even got the word “family” tattooed on his wrist, to his parents’ chagrin.
Bieber and Roth are so close with the Braun clan that both artists get their dental work done by Braun’s parents. (Dr. Susan Braun does Bieber’s Invisalign treatment.)
But as the nominal father figure in this young entertainment clan,
verging-on-30 Braun sometimes finds himself having to discipline his stable of stars.
“If Justin’s a brat, but you still want him to work, so you let him act like a brat, and then afterwards you’re like ‘What a brat!’ then you’re the [jerk],” Braun says. “You’re to blame.”
He’s quick to learn from mistakes. After fans rioted at a canceled Bieber show on Long Island last year, Braun was arrested. Police say he was slow to tweet notice of the cancellation.
“I’m never going to let other people plan events for Justin without my being in control,” he says.
With lessons from Dupri, Usher and Reid in place, Braun has a new role model — David Geffen, whose career he has studied closely. Just as his party promoting days were a means to an end, being a manager is just another stepping stone. His next stop is TV and film.
Bieber’s Aug. 31 concert at Madison Square Garden is being filmed for a 3-D movie, and Braun’s developing an online show for Roth.
Even when Braun relaxes, he’s working. His last basketball game was a two-on-two with Scooter and Bieber’s bodyguard playing Shaquille O’Neal and Shaq’s agent. Just don’t expect him to tweet about it, legal reasons aside.
“If I were really on Twitter telling people my lifestyle every day, it would be a crazy adventure,” he says. “But I don’t think it’s appropriate. I keep to myself in that respect.”