Queen of pop Taylor Swift leveraged her power and privilege this weekend to force Apple to roll back its plans to not pay musicians during Apple Music's three-month free trial period.
Of course, it's more complicated than that. After all, Apple isn't paying musicians; it's paying labels, who are then free to screw artists as they have done since the first label emerged from the trash piles along Tin Pan Alley. Even if Apple does "pay" artists, streaming revenues are typically peanuts, as Billboard and the The Guardian report. Obviously, the whole economics of streaming are bizarre and probably broken, and the streaming services aren't the worst actors; Apple, Spotify, and their ilk typically pay labels around 70 percent of their revenues, but that doesn't translate into big money in the artists' pockets.
A recent study found that of a 10-euro streaming subscription in France, 4.56 euros go to the labels, the streaming services take 2.08 euros, and the artists only get 68 cents. The story gets even muddier when the labels start claiming that they make only teeny-tiny profits on all that, because, you know, expenses.
Swift is also obviously using this controversy to pump her own personal brand. She's all about empathy and connection, and standing up for less privileged artists makes her fans feel like she's going to stand up for them. It's a smart move for a woman who's worth $200 million, but still wants you to feel like she's Becky from your high school.
But that doesn't mean she's wrong. She's right. Apple, a company with $100 billion in cash in the bank, trying to entirely avoid paying content providers is completely ridiculous. Sure, Swift could do more—maybe start a co-op record label in her abundant free time?—but she's doing something, and doing something in the face of stronger people taking advantage of weaker people is always better than doing nothing. Sixty-eight cents is better than zero.
Use Your Voice
My deal with PCMag is that I talk about tech, including the politics of tech. So although it's been pretty constantly on my mind, I haven't been writing much on here about our country's current convulsive struggle with racism. (I've mostly been keeping that to Facebook. No, you can't friend me unless I know you offline.)
But Swift's example in the tech world shows that privilege has tremendous power to make change happen. I'm not sure anyone reading this is as privileged as Swift is, but I'm pretty sure I have a lot of readers who are just privileged enough to affect change in their daily worlds by questioning racist attitudes, stopping cruel jokes, and making it clear that hate—and the symbols of hate, such as the battle flag of an army fighting to keep its fellow citizens enslaved—just aren't cool. Even if you think you aren't privileged, if you get to ignore racism in your daily life, you are, and you have the power to help improve things for those who cannot.
Sometimes it takes millions of voices to make a difference, as we found when the force of American derision helped shut down the awful AT&T/T-Mobile and Comcast/Time Warner mergers. Those would have gone through if millions of people hadn't stepped up and said enough. Sometimes one voice can make a big difference, such as Swift's. But every voice can make a small difference every day.
Think about your own voice, and its power. No matter how small, I think it can change our path for the better.