Quote:
Originally posted by YoYo
What evidence do you have that Apple changed their policy to avoid a media **** storm, rather than, say, they realized the error of their ways?
We're all operating on common sense here.
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I think that timing of the policy change and the stated reason for it, indicates that it was in response to the media jumping on to Taylor's open letter. It might have looked initially that Apple could get away with not paying the royalties without too much public backlash, but after Taylor's letter was widely reported it was clear that this backlash was coming.
The indie labels were pissed off and this did get some media reports about whether not paying the music creators was fair and justifiable, but the media debate wasn't massive. Even on atrl, the issue was not widely debated, despite this being a pop music forum. People were more interested in talking about Madonna's new MV.
Then Taylor wrote her open letter, and suddenly you had the BBC, CNN, Forbes, Time, Washington Post, Huffington Post, New York Times, RollingStone and Billboard all running the story. The nature of the story meant that all the celebrity media would report it, plus all the music industry media, plus all the tech sector media, plus all the general business media like FT and Wall St Journal. This was already happening.
It would have been in all the monday newspapers. The next step would have been all the mainstream media outlets including TV reporting on it. Then the media would have written articles in response to the news, including thinkpieces, then they would have asked Apple for comment, then other artists would have been asked whether they think it was fair that they were not being paid. Most artists and songwriters would have backed being paid over not being paid. How many artists would have publicly sided with Apple and say all the songwriters/producers should not be paid for 3 months? Not many, unless they want to become pariahs in the industry.
Then Spotify and Tidal would have commented about how they treat artists more fairly than Apple, and the global media storm would have continued.
Apple would have wanted the media narrative prior to product launch to be discussion about Apple Music's features and how the GP might find them useful. Thanks to Taylor's letter, the media narrative would have instead been dominated about whether Apple Music is ripping off the music creators, and is even worse than Spotify from that perspective.
We have seen that Tidal was plagued with a negative reception due to a misjudged presentation tone. Tidal wanted the media narrative to be, we are a streaming service that cares more about the rights of music content because we the owners are music content creators too. Instead due to the presentation, the media narrative become Tidal is just helping the rich artists get even richer. Tidal lost control of the story and suffered negative PR after launch and this must have impacted their initial subscription numbers.
Apple CEO obviously made the call to take back control of the media narrative for Apple Music. The story that Taylor calls out Apple for not paying music creators during the trial period became obsolete. That story, with negative PR connotations for Apple, was replaced with Apple will be paying music creators during trial period. Now Apple can keep talking about Apple Music over the next couple of weeks/months without being constantly accused of treating artists badly relative to their competition. Tim Cook decided to take the financial hit of paying royalties, instead of the PR hit to Apple, which would also have had a financial impact on Apple Music's image as well as the company at large.
Also Apple is a publicly traded company. The CEO is not going to risk his job and the credibility of Apple leadership by lying to the stock market and the shareholders about the intentions of the company as part of an elaborate and convoluted marketing campaign involving Taylor Swift, fake contracts to indie labels, and whatever other conspiracy nonsense certain muppets on atrl dream up.
Apple simply misjudged the public reception of not paying music creators royalties during the trial period. It happens. They similarly misjudged the public reaction to the way they distributed U2's latest album. Even the best run companies sometimes make bad calls.
omg I love you Sam 
