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Taylor Swift: Apple's Disdain For Royalties Is 'Shocking, Disappointing'
Mark Wilson writes to note that Apple Music, yet unlaunched, already faces resistance on several fronts. From the BetaNews article:
It's not just smaller, independent labels that are complaining about Apple's refusal to pay artists any royalties during the initial three month free trial period. Taylor Swift has added her voice to the growing number of complainants, writing an open letter to Apple in which she says she will withhold her new album "1989" from the service. In the letter, entitled "To Apple, Love Taylor," the singer says that the company's decision not to make royalty payments is "shocking, disappointing, and completely unlike this historically progressive and generous company." Swift is an artist who could afford to shoulder the cost of three months of not being paid by Apple, but she has chosen to make a stand and stick up for those who are less fortunate.
"shocking, disappointing" are the most common words I've heard use to describe Taylor Swift's music.
Apple really needs to write off the cost as part of their marketing plan. This three months free is their advertising cost and should not be shouldered by the performers.
After all that effort Apple made promoting Swift, this is how she treats them?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
I've been an Apple user for 30+ years, have done work for them, know people within the company, etc. "Generous" is not a word associated with Apple in my experience....
Assuming she's for real in this respect, I appreciate her concern for her comrades in the industry. However, She's pulled her music from Spotify, and now she's pulling it from iTunes. So...she's living off Pandora royalties and CD sales? I mean, the album has been out for quite some time, so she's made most of her millions off it at this point anyway and this is more grandstanding than anything else...but if it were a new release, would she really be this adamant about giving up iTunes revenue, even if it spent a bit too much time in the 'Accounts Receivable' column?
I don't know about her music, but as of now, I say, horray for Taylor Swift.
Apple's business plan is "to get customers for OUR new business, we will give away YOUR music for free!"
Yeah. So, basically, Apple is saying that they, the world's most profitable company, require individual artists to DONATE THEIR WORK FOR FREE... to get Apple's business started.
And they're calculating that individual artists don't have any leverage, there's nothing they can do about it.
So, it's nice to see a singer whose work is selling millions of copies per month standing up to them.
Horray for her.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Ah, the classic blunder of confusing physical goods with intellectual property.
You can wave a magic wand to get a house cleaned. Someone is running a service where a significant portion of users sign up to pay you some change for each cleaning after a 3 month free trial. Is it really a bad deal, even if it did take you a lot of time to make your magic wand?
Swift has a hell of a PR team. She is in the news practically every other day for something. This is not done out of goodwill, this is a business decision.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I bet. Apple has more to loose than to gain, so I predict Apple management will come back with some gesture toward paying artists for the trial period. That's the smart thing to do anyway.
Also, good for her to take this role.
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
Apple has BILLIONS in cash in the bank. LIke, ~$200 billion. And yet people think it's fair that the artists man up and shoulder the cost of a few months of streaming.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
The problem is, the music isn't the artist's property. The labels claim all the rights. The artists theoretical royalties invariably end up being a shit sandwich, without much bread. The labels signed the deal with Apple, because they know that the artists have signed away all their rights already.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Hey, Taylor Swift, you aren't going to get much money out of Apple by complaining about how they license and sell music.
But have you considered suing them over the "Swift" language? Obviously, they are using your trademarked good name in order to sell their new language, and you can probably get a well-deserved buck out of them so that you don't have to starve.
Hey, it worked for Bob Dylan.
The music business model has been predatory against artists since the player piano roll.
Correction: The music business model has been predatory against performers since the player piano roll.
The music business has been predatory against COMPOSERS (also "artists," i'd think) since Petrucci first popularized music printing around the year 1500. You can read about the details here for example, but early music publishers and patrons generally took advantage of composers -- preferring to publish collections of "greatest hits" and getting copyright protection granting exclusive privileges to PUBLISHERS, not the artists who actually created the music. On the few occasions where composers were granted privileges in the 1500s, publishers frequently ignored them and published whatever they wanted anyway, without necessarily giving any money to composers whatsoever.
You have to wait about 75-80 years after music printing first became popular before any composer was really granted a sort of international copyright privilege for his own works that seemed to "stick" (which was granted by the French king and the Holy Roman Emperor to Orlande de Lassus). Composers before that who tried to print their own works were sometimes sued or fined for illegal "printing without a license." (You think I'm joking... I'm not. And you think publishing cartels trying to control artists is new? It's not -- there's a VERY long tradition.)
Anyhow, the point is that any new technology will always try to exploit artists during the period of transition. Moving music around on the internet in electronic form is barely 20 years old. It could be years or even decades before all of the "dust settles" and artists finally establish secure rights in this new medium... if ever.