Joke about TaySway and her army of loyal Tumblr tweens all you want (go on, I dare you), but Swift is an undeniable powerhouse in pop music. Eight months after the launch of 1989, it’s still the fourth-best selling album in the US. And that makes it doubly bad for Apple that she’s just stuck up two middle fingers in the general direction of its new streaming service.
According to Buzzfeed, Apple representatives have confirmed that 1989 won’t be coming to Apple Music at launch. On the one hand, that’s probably to be expected — Swift’s latest isn’t available on any streaming platform, and Taylor is notoriously unimpressed by the entire business model surrounding streaming music. She certainly doesn’t need the extra income, either — 1989 has sold over 5 million copies to date, making it the best-selling album of the last two years.
But despite the track record, this is an undeniable blow for Apple and its vaunted music-industry contacts. Moreso than any other tech company or streaming service (except maybe Tidal), Apple can claim a wealth of contacts in the industry, nurtured over years of iTunes sales and the Beats acquisition, something it likes to remind us at every music-related keynote speech.
But all those contacts and relationships and schmoozing are worth exactly bupkis if Apple Music’s catalogue looks the same as Spotify’s — and guess what, without 1989 or the Beatles, that’s precisely what is set to happen.
[Buzzfeed]