“What does it say about Apple and its executives that Taylor Swift, in a social media post, was able to make it reverse its decision not to pay artists for the first three months on its newest venture, Apple Music?” Jonathon M. Trugman wonders for The NY Post. “Imagine being the top pop star on the planet, worth more than $200 million and just 25 years old, and having more business acumen than the world’s largest company by market cap.”
MacDailyNews Take: Yes, imagine – because fantasy is the only way to arrive at that conclusion.
“One of the more disconcerting questions about Apple’s greedy misstep is: Why would it risk alienating its artists and content providers over 90 days of royalties? That’s pocket change for Apple,” Trugman writes. “It’s almost as if there weren’t an adult in the room when Cue’s team first made its decision.”
MacDailyNews Take: Or it was a planned PR stunt all along.
“At the risk of a p.r. nightmare and lost content, their reward would be saving a few million dollars on royalties for the quarter,” Trugman writes. “Swift just gave Apple’s management the MBA they sorely lacked.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: More free publicity for Apple Music. As planned.
As we last week:
Apple can now claim they did not plan any of this. They had deals in place to stream without paying for the trial period. So, there was no collusion here. They simply did the right thing, thanks to Taylor Swift.
If you think the dominant leader in paid music download sales made a mistake that had to be rectified thanks to Taylor Swift a week before launching a high profile music subscription service, we have an absolutely beautiful bridge for sale in Brooklyn, cheap!
Legality is one thing, PR is another.
What’re Spotify et al. going to do, whine that it’s unfair that Apple is paying the artists* and complain that they’ll have to pay them now, too? The other streaming music services will lose that argument with the artists and with the paying public. Spotify and the rest are between a rock and a hard place.
*in effect, Apple is actually paying the labels who then pay out some percentage of that to the artists.
SEE ALSO:
Apple and ‘boneheaded’ decisions – June 23, 2015
Apple backpedals on Conderate flag censorship – June 27, 2015
Apple purges Confederate flag, but Nazi swastika remains in App Store – June 26, 2015
Tim Cook has let his personal politics affect Apple; Board may have to rein him in – June 25, 2015
Apple removes all American Civil War games from the App Store because of the Confederate flag? – June 25, 2015