Yes or no, she just helped a LOT of artists earn more money… potentially.
Earlier this year Taylor Swift — one of the biggest acts in the music industry — was a free agent.
Then she entered a deal with UMG, the world’s biggest record company.
So what happens when a global superstar partners with a music biz behemoth? The whole roster wins.
Taylor Swift negotiates terms that will benefit other artists on the label.
Sure, she negotiated good terms for herself too. But the most important part of the contract, according to Swift, was that Universal agree to pay even un-recouped artists a sizable portion of the proceeds, should UMG sell any of its shares in Spotify.
For information on why this is a big deal, read this recap from Rolling Stone.
That article also conveys why this move was indeed altruistic, as it benefits other artists to a far greater proportional degree than it benefits Swift, who pulled her catalog from Spotify for years and has windowed her more recent releases.
It’s always nice to see a powerful person use their influence to help others, rather than just grabbing as much cash as they can for themselves. I mean, Taylor is already sitting on top of a mountain of money, but she just helped a ton of musicians (potentially) earn a little more dough, even artists who are in the hole.
Props.
Chris Robley is an acclaimed singer-songwriter and award-winning poet from Maine.
His Beatlesque indie-pop and milltown Americana songs have been praised by The Associated Press, No Depression, KCRW, The LA Times, Boston Globe, NPR, American Songwriter, and others.
His poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Prairie Schooner, The Poetry Review, and more.
Robley has received a Maine Literary Award in Poetry, Boulevard’s Emerging Writers Prize for Poetry, and in 2016 was selected by former US-poet laureate Robert Pinsky as a finalist for the Dorset Prize.