The Swift giveth, the Swift taketh away, the Swift criticize…eth, and the Swift finally giveth again: she’s now announced, after a recent victory, that she’ll be sharing 1989 for streaming on Apple Music.
To summarize the history of Swift’s anti-streaming sentiments: late last year, the pop-star famously pulled all of her music from Spotify, opining in the Wall Street Journal:
…the value of an album is, and will continue to be, based on the amount of heart and soul an artist has bled into a body of work, and the financial value that artists (and their labels) place on their music when it goes out into the marketplace. Piracy, file sharing and streaming have shrunk the numbers of paid album sales drastically, and every artist has handled this blow differently.
Similarly, with the immensely buzzed announcement of Apple Music, Swift swiftly spoke out against the new, multifaceted streaming/download service’s plans for their three month trial period, for which their generosity in providing affordably free service for users came with a catch: they also expected artists to give them their music for free. In an open letter on Tumblr explaining why she wouldn’t be sharing her latest album, 1989, on Apple Music, Swift said:
I find it to be shocking, disappointing, and completely unlike this historically progressive and generous company…This is not about me. Thankfully I am on my fifth album and can support myself, my band, crew, and entire management team by playing live shows. This is about the new artist or band that has just released their first single and will not be paid for its success. This is about the young songwriter who just got his or her first cut and thought that the royalties from that would get them out of debt.
Because Swift is an almighty force, Apple announced, within a day, that they’d shifted their policy, and are now paying artists (something) to stream their music during the trial period. Finally, earlier today, Swift tweeted that she’d at last decided that Apple Music was the rightful streaming home for her massively popular 2014 album:
Seemingly addressing those who thought the whole thing was an elaborate marketing plot, in which Apple and Swift were in cahoots, the musician said:
And because this is all a matter of the heart:
And now they got good blood.