TAYLOR SWIFT JUST CROSSED A PICKET LINE
Proving every point made in the previous post about the state of the entertainment business today is this tidbit, from Matt Belloni’s Hollywood newsletter, “What I’m Hearing”:
Ah, 2014, when Taylor Swift, champion of artists everywhere, withheld her 1989 album from Spotify because the service included her music on a free, ad-supported tier, and she was “not willing to contribute my life’s work to an experiment that I don’t feel fairly compensates the writers, producers, artists, and creators of this music.” It wasn’t about her, she insisted a few months later, when she similarly stood up to Apple. “This is about the new artist or band that has just released their first single and will not be paid for its success,” she wrote in the Journal. “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. This is about the producer who works tirelessly to innovate and create.”
Now? Yeah… so much for the young songwriter in debt. As tons of fellow Universal Music artists suffer through the company’s TikTok boycott over substandard payments, Swift—inarguably the biggest music star on the planet and a billionaire, according to Forbes—is returning to the platform just in time to promote her new album. She owns her masters, so she’s earned greater say in how they’re exploited. But man, this smells bad.
She’s bigfooting UMG artists and putting its C.E.O., Lucian Grainge, in a tough spot, forcing him to explain to top acts like Billie Eilish and Ariana Grande why they can’t leverage TikTok during this standoff. (UMG doesn’t own the Swift masters but distributes and markets her music and administers her publishing.) It also kinda shatters the myth of Taylor thinking about anyone but herself and her business. By returning to TikTok now, she’s essentially crossing a picket line, crapping all over the boycott while actively harming the push for better artist compensation. But hey, she’s padding her own already huge personal fortune!
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oh well.
being an old fogey who has quite deliberately avoided exposure to very few (if any) "new" recording artists, I've been at least a TAD skeptical about ANY claims for ANY recording artist being significant heroes. just a reflex.
everything I've seen of TS, she seems like a nice girl whose heart is in the right place. and she hasn't demonstrated any obvious evidence of being cheap or nasty or even especially temperamental. and of course, I love that politically, her heart (or, at very least, her rhetoric) is in the right place. her music is not my thing, but I get that the music represents a piece of how she connects to her god-knows-how-many fans. still, it's just not my idea of what this late incarnation of...I dunno...country rock, perhaps? I guess I'm put off by the idea of using songs as autobiographical revelations. but that's just me. still, from where I'm sitting, TS strikes me a "net good."
obviously, this opinion (such as it is) is subject to revision. but the flesh can be relied upon to occasionally show how weak it really is.
Taylor Who?