When Taylor Swift speaks, even the most powerful company in the world listens.
Less than 24 hours after Swift complained publicly that Apple was not planning to pay royalties during a three-month trial period of its new streaming music service, the company changed course and confirmed that it would pay its full royalty rates for music during the free trial.
“When I woke up this morning and read Taylor’s note, it really solidified that we need to make a change,” Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet software and services, said in an interview late on Sunday.
Photo: AP
In a letter posted on Sunday morning to her Tumblr page, called “To Apple, Love Taylor,” Swift addressed a situation that had begun to send shock waves through the music industry: Apple, which has announced a subscription streaming service to compete with Spotify, Rhapsody and Deezer, was not going to pay royalties during the trial period.
Swift, who last year pulled her music from Spotify in another dispute over royalties, called Apple’s policy “shocking, disappointing and completely unlike this historically progressive company.”
“We don’t ask you for free iPhones,” she added. “Please don’t ask us to provide you with our music for no compensation.”
Swift had framed her letter as an explanation for why she was withholding her latest album, 1989, from Apple’s new service. However, she said that she was also speaking for other musicians who were afraid to speak up about the issue, and her comments found wide support in the music world.
Apple’s new service, called Apple Music, is set to become available worldwide on June 30. Besides its longstanding iTunes download store, it will include a US$10 streaming subscription plan, a free Internet radio station and a media platform that will let artists upload songs, videos and other content for fans.
Unlike Spotify, which lets customers listen free or pay monthly fees to eliminate ads, Apple’s subscription feature will have no permanent free level.
Apple’s arrival in streaming music has been much anticipated by the music industry, but its plan not to pay royalties during its trial period drew complaints from independent music groups around the world, saying that the company’s terms were unfair.
However, the criticism from Swift — perhaps the biggest star in pop today — was a damaging public-relations misstep for Apple on the eve of its big new product release.
Cue, the Apple executive in charge of iTunes and Apple’s new music service, said the company’s original plan was to pay a slightly higher royalty rate — at least 71.5 percent of the money it collects from sales, as opposed to the industry standard of about 70 percent — in exchange for the free trial.
However, many record executives, particularly at small labels where margins are thin, describe a frightening scenario in which income from important new albums that come out during the free period would not only lose out on crucial download income, but also get nothing from Apple’s new streaming feature.
Cue said that Apple would now pay royalties to both record companies and music publishers for the use of music during the trial period.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day