Taylor Swift shares a few more details about her Apple Music beef and subsequent reconciliation in the latest issue of Vanity Fair, while reserving her harshest words for Apple’s streaming rival Spotify.
“I wrote the letter at around four A.M.,” Swift says, referring to her original open letter to Apple, regarding its refusal to pay streaming royalties during Apple Music’s three month free trial. “The contracts had just gone out to my friends, and one of them sent me a screenshot of one of them. I read the term ‘zero percent compensation to rights holders.’ Sometimes I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and I’ll write a song and I can’t sleep until I finish it, and it was like that with the letter.”
Taylor says she was surprised that Apple so quickly did a turnaround on its policy. “Apple treated me like I was a voice of a creative community that they actually cared about,” she explains.
She also compares Apple to Spotify and notes that, “I found it really ironic that the multi-billion-dollar company reacted to criticism with humility, and the start-up with no cash flow (referring to Spotify) reacted to criticism like a corporate machine.”
I’ll admit that I was plenty skeptical when people first suggested this was a publicity stunt, but is anyone else amazed at how much mileage all parties are getting out of this story?
At a time when Apple Music is being questioned by even high-profile Apple supporters, it must certainly be nice for the company to have the biggest pop star in the world defending them at every turn.
Source: Vanity Fair
Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
2 responses to “Taylor Swift’s love story with Apple Music continues”
“Vanity” pretty much sums it up.
Who cares about the vacuous musings of a vapid white chick who likes to get her ass kissed? She has in one fell swoop become the poster child for everything that has gone wrong with America’s entitled youth, disconnected from reality. So she can at times carry a tune…no company should cater to her frailties.