Member Since: 3/2/2014
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Slate: "Apple afraid of Taylor: Is that a good thing?"
How Taylor Swift Went From Writing Loopy Op-Eds About the Music Industry to Making Apple Cower
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It was pretty easy to laugh a year ago when Taylor Swift penned an essay in the Wall Street Journal arguing that the record industry had erred by giving music to fans for free on streaming platforms like Spotify. "It's my opinion that music should not be free, and my prediction is that individual artists and their labels will someday decide what an album's price point is," she wrote, seemingly ignoring 15 years of evidence suggesting otherwise.
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That brings us to this weekend, when Taylor Swift managed to more or less singlehandedly browbeat Apple into paying artists and labels more money for the rights to their music. Here's what went down. Apple is preparing to launch its new streaming service, Apple Music, at the end of this month. Unlike Spotify, it will only offer a paid subscription option, the basic version of which costs $10 a month. However, it will allow customers to sign up for a free, three-month free trial. Originally, Apple did not plan to pay labels any money for the music fans streamed during that tryout period. But to compensate, it offered to pay rights holders 71.5 percent of all the revenue generated by Apple Music, slightly higher than the streaming-industry standard of 70 percent.
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By the end of the day, Apple had reversed course, with Senior Vice President of Internet Services and Software Eddy Cue announcing via Twitter that the company would in fact pay labels for music streamed during the free trial. As ReCode's Peter Kafka reported, "It can’t be at the same rate that Apple is paying them after free users become subscribers, since Apple is paying out a percentage of revenues once subscribers start paying. Instead, he says, Apple will pay rights holders on a per-stream basis, which [Cue] won’t disclose."
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Cue has said that Apple made the decision in part because of complaints from independent labels but that Swfit's Tumblr post "solidified the issue for us." In other words, she's gone from writing naive-sounding op-eds to forcing Tim Cook's hand on Apple's business practices. In the process, Swift just helped set a new standard for rights-holder payments that other streaming services that rely on free trials will likely need to match in the future if they aren't already. Swift is legitimately becoming one of the more influential voices about the future of the music industry.
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Is that a good thing? I'm not entirely sure. Swift has tended to frame the streaming debate as a conflict between artists and companies like Spotify that want to let fans listen for free. But in doing so, she's tended to gloss over another, equally important issue: The fact that labels pass a very small share of the streaming revenue they earn onto artists. For Swift, that might be less of a concern, given her close relationship with her label, Big Machine, in which her family reportedly owns some equity. But many musicians might be getting ripped off less by tech companies than the people who have always ripped them off—record executives. The more heat Swift helps put on Spotify and Apple, the more she's probably helping take it off of Sony, Universal, and Warner.
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Source: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/...source=twitter
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The one and only Queen of Music. 