Apple Music goes live this coming Tuesday, and normally I wouldn't have much to say about a launch date until the thing actually launches. But something happened last weekend that I keep thinking about, and it's a much better story than "big company ships product on schedule."
Saturday night, Taylor Swift posted something on her Tumblr titled "To Apple, Love Taylor." Not a press release, not a statement through a publicist, just her, writing directly, explaining that she wasn't going to let 1989 stream on Apple Music because Apple's plan was to not pay artists, songwriters, or labels a cent during the three-month free trial period. Her argument was pretty simple and hard to argue with: Apple is one of the most successful companies in the world, this isn't a scrappy startup trying to survive its first year, so asking musicians to eat the cost of a promotional trial felt backwards to her. She wrote that she wasn't even doing it for herself so much as for the songwriters and producers and smaller artists who don't have her leverage and really do need that money.
Here's the part that actually got me. Apple didn't sit on this for a week doing damage control with lawyers and a task force. Eddy Cue, who runs services at Apple, tweeted out a reversal within about a day. Artists would get paid during the trial after all. Done. One Tumblr post from one artist, and a company with over 190 billion dollars in cash on hand changed a policy that had presumably gone through months of internal negotiation with labels.
I don't think that's really a story about Taylor Swift's fame, even though obviously that's why it worked as fast as it did. I think it's a story about how badly the streaming payment structure needs sunlight on it. Most of us have no idea what these deals actually look like — Spotify's free tier pays out fractions of a cent per stream and everybody just sort of shrugs and accepts that's how it works now because nobody with a big enough microphone bothered to push back in public. It took someone with 80 million Twitter followers writing an open letter to get a multinational company to say, out loud, "yeah okay, we'll pay people for the thing they made."
I've been a Spotify subscriber for a couple years now (the $9.99 a month tier, not the family plan, since it's just me), and I'll be honest, I hadn't thought hard about trial-period payouts until this. You just assume somebody's getting a cut somewhere. Reading through the specifics of what Apple was originally planning made me feel a little dumb for not asking the question sooner.
None of this changes whether Apple Music will actually be good. I've heard mixed things about the interface from people who got early access, and Connect, the artist social feature nobody asked for, sounds like it's going to be the MySpace-profile equivalent nobody uses after month one. I'll probably still try the three months free because I'm the kind of person who tries these things, though my prediction is I end up back on Spotify by September out of pure habit more than any real product loyalty. My music library is a mess of ripped CDs, a few stray iTunes purchases from 2009, and whatever playlist I made two apartments ago, so honestly at this point any streaming service that can just make sense of that chaos wins my $9.99.
What I actually want out of this whole episode is for it to set a precedent. Not that every artist needs to write a Tumblr post before every launch, that's not scalable and most artists don't have the leverage to make it work anyway. But it's a good reminder that these platform decisions get made in boardrooms as defaults, and defaults change fast the second somebody with a real audience says the quiet part out loud. Somebody should ask what YouTube pays out per stream next. I'd read that letter too.
Anyway. Tuesday it is. I'll report back once I've actually poked around the app instead of just reading everyone's hot takes about the royalty fight.