I see a new trend emerging in response to the Swift letter / Apple response -- the idea that Apple is exploiting artists and is no better than anyone else in ho

I see a new trend emerging in response to the Swift letter / Apple response -- the idea that Apple is exploiting artists and is no better than anyone else in how it treats people. The funny thing, it's everyone except Apple that gets a free ride from these discussions. First -- Apple is in fact offering a better deal to artists than pretty much anyone else. It's possible Amazon matches Apple in some cases -- as a book author, I know Amazon's "matching" of Apple's 70% is a sham (you only get it if you price your books low, lower than makes sense in many cases, otherwise your royalty is halved -- and even then they subtract "download fees" based on the size of your book from your 70% (or 35%)). When Apple entered the market, 70% was far and away the best deal in town. Since then it's only been exceeded by players trying to make a beach-head. (Incidentally, Apple is going to pay the same percentage of its revenues to artists as everyone else -- but Apple Music has no free tier. In practice, Spotify and Pandora have minuscule revenues. 70% of almost nothing is nothing.) A guy from Pandora chastising Apple for not being altruistic is simply disingenuous. Quoting that guy as an example of the industry being loath to criticize Apple for fear of ... something ... is even more dishonest. (Let's face it, at least part of the reason both Swift and the guy from Pandora couched their criticism in praise is that they aren't disinterested parties -- they're trying to make money too. Being nasty might just draw attention to the fact Taylor Swift is arguing for Apple to give her more money when they aren't collecting any. If a musician's agent or the record company has tickets to give away, do they pay for them? I doubt it.) The bottom line argument is that Apple is offering a free trial loss leader and took the view that it would pay artists X% of what it collected, and X% of nothing is nothing. (A record label or hollywood studio would subtract accrued costs from future royalties, but hey who's counting?) Taylor Swift argues that Apple is taking more value away from the free trial than musicians -- she may be right, or it may be Ping all over again -- but she has a bazillion followers and she's Taylor Swift, so Apple immediately caves. (Hey, they named a programming language after her, what more could she want? j/k) If you sell a CD through a record label, or a movie through a studio, or a game through a games company, you don't see royalties until production and marketing costs have been paid, and Hollywood and the Labels have become masters of padding their costs. For this reason, most artists use their albums as promotional tools for their live performances, and have done so since long before Apple.