Popular singer Taylor Swift is officially making her album 1989 available for streaming on Apple Music.
The announcement comes days after Swift speared Apple for not paying musicians during the Apple Music free-trial period. Now that Apple has acquiesced to paying artists, Swift is willing to put her latest album on the new streaming service:
https://twitter.com/taylorswift13/status/614092816940167168
https://twitter.com/taylorswift13/status/614093248961847296
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https://twitter.com/taylorswift13/status/614093540902195200
Apple’s new music streaming service does not offer a free streaming option. Rather, it decided to do a 3-month free trial starting at the end of June, after which all users would have to upgrade to a paid subscription of $10 a month. During that time period Apple was not going to pay musicians royalties. That decision changed when Swift published a scathing Tumblr post saying musicians should always be paid for their work.
Less than 24 hours later Apple issued an apology via Twitter and said it would be paying musicians even during the trial period. The media cheered Swift’s triumph over the hardware giant.
This is not the first time that Swift has come up against the music streaming industry.
Late last year, Swift decided to pull all of her music off of music streaming service Spotify, because it offers unpaid streaming. “Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for,” she wrote in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal on the future of music.
Some speculated at the time that Swift’s decision to move off of Spotify could sway other mainstream artists to do the same. If that theory holds true, her decision to stream with Apple could also encourage other musicians onto the platform and perhaps exclusively.
That would be a win for Apple, considering that its Apple Music service is launching into a crowded market. Already there’s Spotify, which pioneered the all-you-can-stream model, and now Tidal, a paid streaming service recently launched by Jay Z. Tidal is trying to build its reputation as a platform for exclusive artist content. Its lower tier of $10 a month is comparable to Apple’s, but its higher tier subscription, featuring higher-quality audio, is $20 a month.
With a subscription price of $10 and access to lots of artists already on iTunes, Apple may be able to find a nice sweet spot as a streaming service, especially with artists like Swift onboard. Already Apple made a name for itself as the go-to platform for purchasing music, so it may be able to position its new service as a gateway for buying music — a proposition many artists will like indeed.
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