[bedhead]

I'm fine with Taylor Swift maximizing her own revenue...if she was simply honest about it. She is demonstrably not. She decided to turn it into a moral crusade and in her own words, "This is not about me." I am so turned off by it. Do you really think it's a coincidence that the only artist to write a big open letter to Apple about this was the one who stood to profit the most from it?????

[nalsh]

Oh I agree with you there, if Taylor herself is solely responsible for this note. The weird thing is, although we use "she" to describe Taylor Swift, Taylor Swift is a coordinated business. This memo is really just a correspondence between two large businesses.

Could be a bit of a stretch, and this note wouldn't be made public if she didn't sign off on it, but I think this is more measured than an artist just pushing for revenue.

[bedhead]

I honestly think Taylor Swift wrote this entire letter herself. She famously takes pride in writing her own music and going out of her way to say things that go beyond promoting herself. (Fwiw I kinda like her album) But she's wrong here, and I intensely dislike how she's manipulating the situation by reducing it to, "Apple has a lot of money and smaller artists don't." It's actually wildly business-savvy on her part.

When she previously removed her album from Spotify she implicitly let it be known what her motivations were: maximizing her own revenue, even if it was at the expense of other musicians. End of story. She would rather you give your $12 entirely to her instead of Spotify (or another album), which spreads it around. And I'm totally fine with that decision since she might seriously be the only musician alive with enough juice to get away with it. But the point remains that she's already made her motives perfectly clear, so when she wrote that letter to Apple it was purely about making sure she got paid during that three month trial. Of course, other artists will get to ride her coat-tails some, so she played up that angle and pretended it was a moral crusade. If she tells Apple, "Tell you what, take the money you'd pay me during those three months and distribute it evenly to everyone else." then I'd applaud her. Until then, she's a hypocrite going after more money.