Taylor Swift Gets Apple Music to Pay Up
On Sunday morning, Taylor Swift took Apple to task for the royalty agreement on its news music streaming service. Her open letter on Tumblr, titled “To Apple, Love Taylor,” said, “I’m sure you are aware that Apple Music will be offering a free 3 month trial to anyone who signs up for the service. I’m not sure you know that Apple Music will not be paying writers, producers, or artists for those three months. I find it to be shocking, disappointing and completely unlike this historically progressive and generous company.”
Related Link: How the Video Game Industry Is Failing Its Fans
“Three months is a long time to go unpaid, and it is unfair to ask anyone to work for nothing,” the pop singer argued on the behalf of music-makers everywhere, many of whom had voiced their discontent with the royalty policy. She concluded her letter saying, “We don’t ask you for free iPhones. Please don’t ask us to provide you with our music for no compensation.”
It was a sentiment shared by many independent music artists and producers. Just a few weeks earlier, the American Association for Independent Music had chimed in, “Since a sizable percentage of Apple’s most voracious music consumers are likely to initiate their free trials at launch, we are struggling to understand why rights holders would authorize their content on the service before October 1st.”
It took less than 24 hours for the “historically progressive and generous company” to respond via Twitter, and it didn’t wait until morning to make its announcement. Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, personally called Swift to deliver the news before tweeting at 11:29 p.m., “#AppleMusic will pay artists for streaming, even during customers’ free trial period.”
Cue followed up with a feel-good response a minute later: “We hear you @taylorswift13 and indie artists. Love, Apple.” Later, Cue said that the company will pay artists on a per stream basis during the free trial period, although Cue declined to say what the rate would be. Once the free introductory period is over, Apple Music will pay music owners 71.5 percent of Apple Music’s overall subscription revenue in the United States.
Swift tweeted her response and addressed it to her fans and supporters: “I am elated and relieved. Thank you for your words of support today. They listened to us.”
Related Link: Apple Muscles Into Streaming Music Market
Swift’s crusade on social media showed the increasing weight that collective opinions on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook can have to force a change in corporate policy and direction. In a comic echo of that power, BuzzFeed promptly put together a list of 18 more issues Swift could fix through the power of social media, ranging from the battery life of iPhones to the size of Pringles cans.
Apple Music is launching on June 30, offering users a free, three-month subscription period. After that, the service will charge $9.99 a month for individuals and $14.99 a month for families with up to six members.
Chart of the Day: Why US Fertility Rates Are Falling
U.S. fertility rates have fallen to record lows for two straight years. “Because the fertility rate subtly shapes many major issues of the day — including immigration, education, housing, the labor supply, the social safety net and support for working families — there’s a lot of concern about why today’s young adults aren’t having as many children,” Claire Cain Miller explains at The New York Times’ Upshot. “So we asked them.”
Here are some results of the Times’ survey, conducted with Morning Consult. Read the full Times story for more details.
A Record Low 47% of US Adults Say They're 'Extremely Proud' to Be American
Gallup says that, for the first time in the 18 years it’s been asking U.S. adults how proud they are to be Americans, fewer than half say they are "extremely proud." Just 47 percent now say they’re extremely proud, down from 70 percent in 2003.
Another 25 percent say they’re “very proud” — but the combined 72 percent who say they’re extremely or very proud is also the lowest Gallup has recorded. Pride levels among liberals and Democrats have plunged since 2017. Overall, 74 percent of Republicans and just 32 percent of Democrats call themselves “extremely proud” to be American.
Pfizer Has Raised Prices on 100 of Its Products
Weeks after President Trump said that drugmakers were about to implement “voluntary massive drops in prices” — reductions that have yet to materialize — Pfizer has raised prices on 100 of its products, The Financial Times’s David Crow reports:
“The increases were effective as of July 1 and in most cases were more than 9 per cent — well above the rate of inflation in the US, which is running at about 2 per cent. … Pfizer, the largest standalone drugmaker in the US, did decrease the prices of five products by between 16 per cent and 44 per cent, according to the figures.”
Crow notes that Pfizer also raised prices on many of its medicines in January, meaning that some prices have been hiked by nearly 20 percent this year. The drugmaker said that it was only changing prices on 10 percent of its medicines and that list prices did not reflect what most patients or insurers actually paid. The net price increase after rebates and discounts was expected to be in the “low single digits,” the company told the FT.
Chart of the Day: Pass-Through Tax Deductions Made Easy
The Republican tax overhaul was supposed to simplify the tax code, but most experts say it fell well short of the goal. Martin Sullivan, chief economist at Tax Analysts, tweeted out a chart of the analysis required to determine whether income qualifies for the passthrough tax deduction of 20 percent, and as you’ll see, it’s anything but simple.
A Conservative Bashes GOP Dysfunction on Spending Cuts
Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, offers a blistering critique of congressional Republican’s problems cutting spending:
Since the Republicans took the House in 2011, nearly every annual budget blueprint has promised to balance the budget within a decade with anywhere from $5 trillion to $8 trillion in spending cuts. And yet, you may have noticed, the budget has not moved towards balance. This is because the budget merely sets a broad fiscal goal. To actually cut spending, Congress must follow up with specific legislation to reform Medicare, Medicaid, and all the other targeted programs. In reality, most lawmakers who pass these budgets have no intention whatsoever of cutting this spending. As soon as the budget is passed, the targets are forgotten. The spending-cut legislation is never even drafted, much less voted on.
The annual budget exercise is thus a cynical exercise in symbolism. Congress calculates how much spending must be cut over ten years to balance the budget. Then they pass legislation setting a goal of cutting that amount. Then they move on to other business. It’s like a baseball team announcing that they voted to win the next World Series, and then not showing up to play the season.
Read the full piece at National Review.