How Taylor Swift socked it to Apple over a weekend

All hail Taylor Swift. How she must give baby boomers the fear. Not just baby boomers. Also those who came next, the Generation Xers, who seemed to define themselves culturally mainly via goatees, apathy and heroin. And my own rather listless, half-generation thereafter, with our bigger beards and binge-drinking. Taylor Swift makes us all look old. Because we are old and the world will be hers.

You will have heard about her victory over Apple this week — you must have heard about it, because an opportunity to put Taylor Swift on the front of a newspaper is an opportunity not to be missed, particularly now that Elizabeth Hurley is getting on a bit and Princess Kate isn’t getting out much. In brief, Apple, the great corporate giant, is launching a music streaming service, which essentially allows people to listen to music without buying it, via subscription. For the first three months, Apple had planned to give this music away free, and pay no royalties for doing so. Swift, though, declared it unacceptable that the behemoth would not ‘be paying writers, producers, or artists for those three months’, and threatened to boycott. So over the course of a weekend, Apple changed its mind.

It’s rum, this ‘artists’ business. Everybody likes an artist. Oh, to be an artist. In fact, though, when Swift talks about artists, what she really means is ‘record labels’. Truthfully, this was not a fight between the big guy and the little guys, but one between the big guy and some other guys who are still quite big, but shrinking. The little guy, to be frank, gets screwed either way. Which is not at all how the internet was meant to work out, at least if you’re my age or older. Taylor Swift isn’t, though. Which is the point.