“It took Taylor Swift less than 24 hours to make technology giant Apple Inc. back down,” Tim Culpan and Aki Ito report for Bloomberg. “In the wake of a stinging rebuke from the pop singer, Apple made a rare public about-face on an earlier decision not to pay royalties for songs played on its new streaming-music service during a three-month free trial.”
“Swift penned an open letter on Tumblr, calling the policy ‘shocking, disappointing, and completely unlike this historically progressive and generous company,'” Culpan and Ito report. “‘When I woke up this morning and saw what Taylor had written, it really solidified that we needed a change,’ Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president for Internet and software, said in an interview with Billboard Sunday. ‘And so that’s why we decide we will now pay artists during the trial period.'”
“The reversal isn’t a total loss for Apple, which has more than $190 billion in cash and can easily afford higher royalty payments. It also is generating untold publicity for the new service,” Culpan and Ito report. “Once the decision was made by Cue and Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook, Cue called Swift on the phone from her tour in Amsterdam, according to Billboard. ‘I let her know that we heard her concerns and are making the changes,” Cue told Billboard. “We have a long relationship with Taylor so I wanted her to hear directly from us.’ …’I am elated and relieved. Thank you for your words of support today. They listened to us,’ Swift said in her own tweet.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: If this isn’t brilliant PR in action, it ought to be.
More on that here.
Spotify is hating life even more today. Just wait until Swift announces that “1989” is exclusive to Apple Music.