Taylor Swift on Apple Music’s Three-Month Free Trial

Taylor Swift, explaining why she’s withholding her latest album from Apple Music:

I’m sure you are aware that Apple Music will be offering a free 3 month trial to anyone who signs up for the service. I’m not sure you know that Apple Music will not be paying writers, producers, or artists for those three months. I find it to be shocking, disappointing, and completely unlike this historically progressive and generous company. […]

Three months is a long time to go unpaid, and it is unfair to ask anyone to work for nothing. I say this with love, reverence, and admiration for everything else Apple has done. I hope that soon I can join them in the progression towards a streaming model that seems fair to those who create this music. I think this could be the platform that gets it right.

Not sure what the solution is here, but her position seems perfectly reasonable. The problem is, Apple is leading the industry in pushing for streaming music to be entirely behind a paywall. The entire point of the free trial is to get more people to pay for streaming in the long term.

Also raises the question of just how many other top-shelf music acts will not be available on Apple Music when it launches. After the WWDC keynote, I simply could not get a straight answer from anyone at Apple about just how much of the iTunes Music library will be available on Apple Music when it launches. Part of that might be that they’re still negotiating with some labels and top-shelf acts, but I can’t help but suspect part of it is that they know they’re not going to have everything, and they don’t want to talk about that.

★ Sunday, 21 June 2015