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The Hypocrisy of Taylor Swift

Everybody’s up Taylor Swift’s butt for her ‘stand’ against Apple. If you haven’t heard, Apple started a new streaming service and wanted to hold back royalties during the initial three month trial period. Naturally, that meant less money for Taylor Swift. So, to fight for her larger bank account, she railed against Apple on Tumblr. She found it “shocking, disappointing, and completely unlike this historically progressive and generous company” that they would do this. And further framed it as a fight for the little guy.

This is about the new artist or band that has just released their first single and will not be paid for its success. This is about the young songwriter who just got his or her first cut and thought that the royalties from that would get them out of debt.

Riiight, first off, ain’t no one getting rich off streaming, Taylor. Especially those tiny artists not playing stadium shows like you.

As a result, the media couldn’t stop praising her and smelling her farts.

“Taylor Swift’s Open Letter to Apple Music Immediately Inspires Huge Change to Streaming Service” – US Weekly

“The power of Taylor Swift” – CNN

“Five ways Taylor Swift is changing the world” – BBC News

“10 Other Things People Want Taylor Swift to Fix Now” – Billboard

“How Taylor Swift took on Apple and won” – Glamour UK

It’s like she gave everyone the greatest blowjob ever (Charlotte McKinney has something to say about that, by the way).

Yea, well, turns out, Taylor Swift is a HUGE hypocrite.

Jason Sheldon, a freelance photographer, posted his own missive online and included a contract that Swift forces all concert photographers sign. Basically, Swift makes them give up their photos to her for a one-time fee and she can use those photos whenever, forever and however long she wants. Fair? Not fair at all. Not to Sheldon at least:

You say in your letter to Apple that “Three months is a long time to go unpaid”. But you seem happy to restrict us to being paid once, and never being able to earn from our work ever again, while granting you the rights to exploit our work for your benefit for all eternity.

How are you any different to Apple? If you don’t like being exploited, that’s great — make a huge statement about it, and you’ll have my support. But how about making sure you’re not guilty of the very same tactic before you have a pop at someone else?

So, let’s see. Swift doesn’t want people streaming her music unless she gets paid more. Yet, it’s alright to pay photographers relative pennies (to the value of those photos). What about the photographers and the royalties on those photos that might get them out of their debt? Does that matter to Swift? Nah, you know the answer to that.

Photographers need to earn a living as well. Like Apple, you can afford to pay for photographs so please stop forcing us to hand them over to you while you prevent us from publishing them more than once, ever.

With all due respect to you too Taylor, you can do the right thing and change your photo policy.  Photographers don’t ask for your music for free.  Please don’t ask us to provide you with your marketing material for free.

And Taylor’s response? About the same as this woman’s response after calling LeBron a “pussy ass bitch”.

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bilbo
bilbo
8 years ago

Thank you so much for this. I absolute hate that fucking cunt.