Apple Backs Down to Taylor Swift’s Open Letter. Will Pay Artists During Apple Music Free Trial

June 22, 2015

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I’ve been watching the release of Apple’s new streaming service, which was just announced at the company’s World Wide Developer Conference earlier this month. As part of the launch of Apple Music, customer’s would be given a free trial period but during that trial period no royalties would be paid to artists.

Taylor Swift, who has previously been a strong advocate for artists’ royalties (and here at the Poor Audiophile, we agree with Taylor Swift’s position and have previously written about the topic here and also here) penned an open letter on Tumblr on the topic entitled, “To Apple, Love Taylor” where she said that she will be holding back her album, 1989 from Apple’s new streaming service.

CNet broke the story that Apple’s Eddy Cue, Apple’s VP of Internet Software and Services, announced on Twitter that the Apple was reversing its “no pay” policy.

Apple rightly deserves the constructive criticism for their initial decision to leave artists unpaid during the free trial period; and Apple indeed deserves a tremendous amount of credit for its about face on this issue. Simply put, it was the right decision.

If we as audiophiles and consumers want music to be an intimate part of our lives then we need to support the artists who make that music. While streaming music is certainly gaining momentum, at this point it’s not a very fair model for the musicians. While Apple’s decision was certainly the right one, there is still a long way to go for the streaming music business model to be a fair one for musical artists.