So this happened over the weekend and I'm still turning it over in my head. Taylor Swift posted a letter on her Tumblr Sunday night, "To Apple, Love, Taylor," basically calling out Apple Music for planning to not pay artists or songwriters anything during the three-month free trial that's supposed to kick off June 30th. No streaming royalties at all for those three months, just... nothing. And then Apple, to their actual credit, folded within about 18 hours. Eddy Cue tweeted out that Apple would pay artists during the trial period after all, full stop, no more debate about it.
I want to be careful not to just write "famous pop star yells at Apple, Apple listens" because that's the headline everyone's already run with. What I keep thinking about is the mechanics of it. A regular indie label or a session musician's manager could have sent that exact same letter to Apple's legal team in April when this policy was reportedly floated around, and nothing would have happened. It took someone with 80 million Twitter followers and a Grammy shelf to get a Fortune 500 company to reverse a term-sheet decision in under a day. That's not really a story about fairness winning out. It's a story about leverage, and about who gets to have it.
I've got a friend, plays bass and does session work around here, who's been ranting about Spotify payouts to anyone who'll listen for a couple years now — fractions of a cent per stream, checks that don't cover a tank of gas. None of that changed this weekend. Spotify's model isn't touched by any of this. What changed is that one specific company, for one specific three-month window, on one specific service that hasn't even launched yet, decided not to stiff people. That's good! I'm glad it happened. I just don't think it tells us anything about the next fight, which will probably involve artists nobody's heard of going up against a company with way less incentive to blink.
The trial itself is still a weird bet
Set the payment dispute aside for a second — the trial structure itself is a gamble I don't fully get. Three months free, then $9.99 a month (or $14.99 for the family plan, which is the same price Spotify's had for a while now). Apple's betting that three months is long enough to get people hooked on the playlists and the human-curated stuff and Beats 1, the internet radio thing they've been talking up, and short enough that it doesn't just become "the free app I use forever and then delete before the bill hits." I don't know which way that goes. I switch between three different streaming apps depending on my mood already, so my listening habits are not exactly a stable baseline to predict from.
What actually impressed me more than the reversal itself was the speed. Eighteen hours is nothing for a company Apple's size. There was no committee, no "we're reviewing your concerns," no statement from PR three days later after the news cycle had already moved on. Someone at Apple, probably several someones, looked at the letter, agreed it was a bad look, and just changed the policy. I've worked at places where getting a Slack channel name changed took longer than that. Whether that's because Cue actually agreed on principle or because someone ran the math on how many "Taylor Swift boycotts Apple" articles were about to exist, I genuinely don't know, and I'd guess it's some mix of both.
Anyway. Apple Music proper still hasn't shown up yet. That's next week's problem, and I'm sure half the tech blogs I read will have their "first impressions" posts up within hours of it going live, mine probably included if I can get an invite code in time. For now the interesting part isn't the product, it's watching a giant company get publicly embarrassed into doing the obviously correct thing, and noticing how unevenly that particular trick gets to work depending on who's holding the microphone.
Also, small unrelated note because I don't want to make a whole separate post out of it: Netflix's board approved a 7-for-1 stock split this week. If you're one of the two people I know who actually own NFLX shares outside a retirement account, that's a thing that's happening to your portfolio soon, for what it's worth.