Taylor Swift revolts, Apple changes tune on royalties
Apple knows that upsetting Taylor Swift is trouble, trouble, trouble.
I'm Bridget Carey this is your CNet update.
[MUSIC]
Apple is changing how it's going to pay royalties for musicians on its new music service.
And all it took was a blog post from Taylor Swift.
You see, Ms. Swift holds much sway in the music world.
She criticized Apple in a tumblr post on Sunday, telling her fans that she's taking her album, 1989, off of the Apple music streaming service when it launches next week.
She did not approve of how Apple would not pay royalties for any songs streamed during a person's three month free trial.
She wrote, I find it to be shocking, disappointing and completely like this historically progressive and generous company.
The post continues to make the point that it wasn't about her needing the money but the principal of the matter.
And the system can hurt new artists that depend on those royalties to get started.
She wrote, we don't ask you for free iPhones.
Please don't ask us to provide you with our music for no compensation.
Well, Apple certainly doesn't want any bad blood between Taylor Swift.
So after the post, Apple quickly responded and changed its Policy.
Eddy Cue, Apple's Executive that oversees iTunes and the new music service, took to Twitter to say Apple's gonna pay artists during the free trial.
Cue told reports he personally called Taylor Swift to tell her about Apple's policy change, and Swift posted to Twitter that she's elated and relieved, but as of this report she has not yet agreed to let Apple stream her songs on the new service.
Guess she's not quite ready to shake it off.
Apple Music launches June 30th, and after the three month free trial, it costs $10 a month.
The service lets you play any song in the iTunes library on demand.
Swift also has criticized ...inside Spotify and pulled her music off that service.
Spotify offers a free version with advertisements.
You see, it's a crowded market now for music streaming and if you don't have a big named artist like Taylor Swift, it could be hard to win.
Switching gears to shopping.
Amazon is changing it's customer review system in the U.S. to highlight reviews that are supposed to be more helpful to you and me.
So how does it know what's more helpful?
A computer is calculating different factors giving more influence to newer reviews.
And anything written by a verified Amazon purchaser.
It's also taking into consideration anything that is that is voted up by customers.
All of this will also impact the five-star rating.
It used to be just a pure average of all reviews, but now some people are going to have more power to change a rating than others.
The new system began Friday.
And, you may have noticed more social media companies are hungry for a piece of the shopping action.
Twitter just launched product pages to highlight things you can buy right on Twitter.
And some businesses are also...
Also highlighting items for sale on twitter as collections.
That's is for this seg's news roundup but there's always more at cnet.com.
From our studios in New York, I'm Bridget Carey.
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