Taylor forces Apple to listen

Apple is not a company famed for listening. After all, it prides itself on knowing what consumers want before they do, so why should it care what they think? All the more surprising then, that it should have listened to one angry customer, a Ms T Swift of Beverly Hills, California.

It helped, of course, that Taylor Swift is probably the biggest name in the recording industry right now. But her more in sorrow than anger Tumblr post about Apple's "shocking, disappointing" plan to pay artists nothing for the first three months of its Apple Music service certainly had an instant impact.

Within hours Apple's Eddy Cue - he of the rather embarrassing dad-dancing sequence at the launch of Apple Music - had reversed the policy. And even more surprisingly, this executive at a company which has until recently been very shy about using social media took to Twitter to do it.

"#AppleMusic will pay artist for streaming, even during customer's free trial period" said @cue in only the 81st Tweet he had ever sent.(Presumably more than one artist will benefit.) Warming to his theme he fired out his 82nd: "We hear you @taylorswift13 and indie artists. Love, Apple".

Now, cynics may say that Apple listened to Taylor Swift, after ignoring the plight of thousands of those indie artists. They had been making a fuss ever since it emerged that during the three-month free trial period of Apple Music they would get nothing.

For Ms Swift - as she acknowledged in her Tumblr post - this was going to be only a minor inconvenience. But for less well-known artists and their labels, there was the prospect of all their revenue just drying up quite suddenly on 30 June when Apple Music launches. After all, 800 million people have iTunes accounts and must be quite likely to at least try this new service for three months - and while they do, they are unlikely to spend much on downloads or other ways of consuming music.

At least one boss of an independent record label was grateful for the superstar's intervention. He's still in the middle of complex negotiations with Apple so didn't want to go on the record but he said of Taylor Swift "she's a very smart cookie. There was a huge worldwide unhappiness and she picked a very effective moment to speak". He still thought there was plenty of detail to be sorted out with Apple but said "they blinked".

The question is why they did that. Sure, the money that will now be paid out to artists over the next three months will hardly be more than a rounding error, so this is not a costly u-turn. But it is still unusual for the company to back down in negotiations with much weaker parties.

Perhaps the veteran music producer Jimmy Iovine and Dr Dre, inside Apple since their Beats business was purchased, are making their voices heard on behalf of artists. Or maybe Apple has realised it's found a way of wrong-footing the current leader in the music streaming market.

Spotify has also had its problems with a number of artists over what it pays out for every stream, and Taylor Swift has been among the fiercest critics, keeping all of her music off the service. If Apple can now boast that it will be the place to stream Bad Blood and other hits you can't get on a certain Swedish service, then an embarrassing climb-down may turn into a brilliant coup.