In a new interview with the London Evening Standard, Apple executive Jimmy Iovine has shed some more light on the day that Taylor Swift published her open letter to the company calling for artists to be fairly compensated during the three-month free trial of Apple Music. In her letter, Swift called on Apple to do the right thing and not ask artists to provide their music for no compensation. In today’s interview, Iovine described the behind-the-scenes workings that saw Apple change its tune regarding compensating artists during the free Apple Music trial:
“Eddy [Cue, Apple senior VP] woke up on Sunday morning,” says Iovine. “He called me and said, ‘This is a drag’. I was like, ‘Yeah, maybe there’s some stuff she doesn’t understand’. He said, ‘Why don’t you give Scott [Borchetta, Swift’s label boss] a call? I called Scott, I called Eddy back, Eddy and Tim [Cook, Apple CEO] called me back and we said, ‘Hey, you know what, we want this system to be right and we want artists to be comfortable, let’s do it’.”
Further along in the interview, Iovine discussed Beats 1 and what it took for him to poach famed-BBC 1 DJ Zane Lowe from London. The executive noted that while it wasn’t an easy task, it has been well worth it with Lowe getting an insane amount of work done in his first 19 weeks at Apple:
“What he’s done in 19 weeks shouldn’t have been possible,” he says. Was it easy to convince Lowe to leave London? “It wasn’t easy but that was my job and I come from a world of knowing when someone is special.”
Iovine also touched on his relationship with Steve Jobs in the interview, pointing out that when Napster launched, he became focused on finding a relationship in the tech world. Iovine then worked with Jobs prior to the launch of iTunes.
The full interview can be read here and covers topics including rival streaming services, Beats, Iovine’s relationship with Dre, and more. Earlier this week, Taylor Swift gave an interview to Vanity Fair in which she explained her appreciation for how Apple responded to her open letter while negatively describing Spotify’s response to her.
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I don’t support this decision. TS is clearly not very business savvy, if she doesn’t understand A) a free trial is going to result in more paying users in the end, and B) Apple knows wtf they are doing when it comes music, and making money for artists.
It was the wrong decision.
I agree, but sadly this is the cost of business. “Oh but the artists deserve to be paid during the free trial!” Oh, well Apple should be paid also, but it’s a free trial. After the free trial, people (hopefully) pay. Then Apple gets paid, artists get paid, hopefully everyone wins. But to get to the “everybody wins” part you need to take a small loss first.
Greedy artist clamoring for their (literal) 2 cents of royalties.
As I understand it, it’s not Taylor herself doing the business side of things, but her mother. Anyway, none of these streaming services pay artists during the trial, it was only Apple who wanted to give people a 3 month period, over the standard 1 month. That’s what got TS upset, IMO a non-issue (but I’m not an artist)
More paid users in the end? Apple got 11 million to sign up for the free trail, thats piss poor considering only a fraction of that will stay for the paid model……wake up
TS is not very business savvy, but has a net worth of $200,000,000.
Got ya.
PM Zanetti doesn’t get it. Artists need to get paid whether or not Apple wants to offer a free trial, that’s Apple decision and the artists shouldn’t have to take a pay cut. Plus, 3 months add up to a lot of money, especially if they have a new release during that 3 month period. Imagine those that released a new hit and they didn’t get paid during the biggest three months of their release? Do employees at a company take a 3 month pay cut because the company offers a 3 month free trial? NOPE. Apple employees aren’t taking a 3 month pay cut, so why should artists.
OH, TS’s father is a financial advisor at Merrill Lynch, I’m sure she’s probably gets an earful from her father.
that is a silly argument to make. apple is trying to gain market share in a new category for them by providing a 3 month free trial. however, the artists shouldn’t have to provide free music just because apple wants to run a promotion to gain market share. no one is forcing apple to provide a 3 month free trial over the standard 1 month trial. if they want to provide it, they need to pay for it. its just the cost of trying to gain market share.
First, I’ll echo some of the other commenters…”Taylor Swift isn’t very business savvy”? WTF are you smoking? Because we can sell that stuff. Buffoonish statement right there, prima facie facts and all that.
But the larger mindset that because Apple was “right” because it was doing this “for the music” is both pervasive among Apple folks (and even non-Apple music fans), and completely inexplicable. A musician’s “product” is their music; that somehow they should just accept that some 3rd-party group, for whatever reason (for a, perhaps mutual, financial gain) can come along and steal that product is absurd. Take your statement and substitute in some other nouns: let’s say you are wanting to start up a business doing something you want to do, let’s say make an iOS app, and your plan is give that app away for free for 90 days. It is going to be a REALLY great app! Seriously. But people are going to need iPhones and iPads to run that great app, so you just go into an Apple Store and steal a backroom-full of them. Now, you’re nice enough to leave a note, SOME of those people you give them to are TOTES going to maybe buy them, or maybe they’ll end up buying other Apple hardware to use with them (like a charger, maybe from another company, but probably Apple-licensed, right?). Plus, they’ll probably buy more apps too, which Apple gets a 30% cut on.
That’s completely a legit plan, right? I mean, nobody would convict you of theft…oh, I know, Apple’s products are COMPLETELY different than a song. Right. Completely different. Your product needs their product to succeed, and therefore whatever goofy business plan you concoct they should be alright with. That’s your narrative.
More absurd, in my mind, is that by Iovine’s own testimony in this interview NO ONE at Apple, a company with $200B cash on hand, not Eddie Cue, not Tim Cook, saw the inherent unfairness to artists in DOING this heist UNTIL Taylor Swift spoke up. THEN they were like, LIGHBULB, “uhhh, maybe this isn’t the right way. Artists might be unhappy with us stealing their products for 90 days.” Seriously? No one? What a greedy bunch of f’ing a-holes. I’m unsurprised by Iovine’s role in all of it, anyone with even a passing knowledge of his history wouldn’t be; but Cook and Cue and Apple execs? No one understood that conscriptively TAKING the product of another company for 90 days was just pure out and out theft, was just WRONG?? It is a sad commentary on how the folks at the top of Apple think. Embarrassing, even, for people making million dollar salaries because of how “brilliant” they are supposed to be. And more embarrassing for the fools that elevate them upon pedestals. (Though, obviously, most of those fools feel no embarrassment because they’re too foolish to even understand the extent of that foolishness.) This whole brouhaha never should have even happened.
I’ll post once CDBaby sends me the first infos on Apple Music Streaming income. So far it’s been iTunes sales and some iTunes Match sales (which, for some reason, round up to 0.00$ per every iTunes Match sale.. must be in the microcents..)
Good luck. CD Baby isn’t even a registered member of the RIAA to my knowledge. They don’t check to make sure what they distribute is even legal since they don’t require people to show proof they actually have all of the legal rights for ownership and distribution. In fact, most of the on-line distributors and resellers don’t check to ensure that all proper/legal contracts are in place. The only ones that check are the big distribution companies like Sony, BMG, etc. Gots to have legal contracts by all parties on each track and they need to have proper legal representation, if you don’t have it, then the validity of being legal of what you are selling/distributing is going to be in question. I don’t have much respect for CD Baby. I will never do business with them. I already know their game.
Why are you so obsessed with the fact TS dad is a financial analyst? Is ever kid an expert in their parents boring career? If Taylor listened to her dad drone about finances long enough to actually understand it she wouldnt have time to write music, record it, and travel the world…..
Not sure what to say to that. I’ve been reported to promptly, and my music is on iTunes / Apple Music very reliably.
What does RIAA have to do with an independent electronic musician posting his stuff on CDBaby and through there to iTunes / Spotify / Apple Music? I guess you’re responding to someone else, maybe?
I saw and article somewhere, sorry I don’t remember where but TS’s license agreement for her photographers, carry equally restrictive rights as the first three months of Apple Music. She didn’t complain about that.
Eddy Cue and Iovine, Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dee. And these guys are highly paid people in upper management? Face palm.
lmao high 5 :)