Taylor Swift may be best known for bubble-gum pop anthems loved by teenage girls, but at 25 she has shown herself to be a formidable force in the business world, as Apple found out.
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Apple, a $970 billion tech leader that is rarely described as laid-back in its commercial strategies, quickly did an about-face on Sunday after Swift threatened a partial boycott of its new streaming service unless the company improved compensation for artists.
The episode underscored how Swift has emerged as a premier power broker from the millennial generation, able not only to pack arenas around the world but also to turn her massive fan base into valuable leverage.
Key to Swift's success has been a precocious talent for controlling her image, allowing her to promote her music aggressively while keeping a sugar-sweet public persona.
And her vital tool is social media, through which she interacts with pointed regularity with fans.
With more than 59 million Twitter followers, she is topped only by fellow pop stars Katy Perry and Justin Bieber, and President Barack Obama.
Swift took to social media to air her grievances with Apple, which next week is launching a streaming service as the iTunes company seeks to expand in the growing area of on-demand, unlimited music services.
Saying she was speaking up for artists afraid of incurring Apple's wrath, Swift complained about the company's initial plan not to pay royalties for streams during customers' free three-month trial.
"We don't ask you for free iPhones. Please don't ask us to provide you with our music for no compensation," she wrote.
Within the day, senior Apple executive Eddy Cue telephoned Swift on her tour stop in Amsterdam and announced that Apple would compensate artists during the trial period and eat the cost.
It was not the first time that Swift has taken issue with streaming.
Last year, she removed her entire catalogue from streaming leader Spotify as she accused the Swedish company, which offers a free tier, of insufficiently compensating artists.
The move put Spotify on the defensive, with chief Daniel Ek insisting that the company has paid back what now amounts to $3.87 billion in royalties.
At the same time, her campaign hardly dented Spotify, which has grown rapidly in the past year and counts Swift among the few prominent contemporary artists (Bjork, Radiohead and Garth Brooks are among others) to refuse to stream at least some of their works.
In a sales campaign of the sort that is increasingly rare in the digital age, Swift promoted 1989 through a tie-in with a fast-food chain and Polaroid pictures in the CDs to encourage collectors.
In one move that could belie her image as a marketing genius, Swift performed in 2008 for the Republican presidential convention that nominated the losing ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin.
AAP