William Gallagher
Apple Music teams were working extensively with Taylor Swift to ready her new album and its promotion long before "The Tortured Poets Department" is due to be released.
Taylor Swift was Apple Music's artist of the year for 2023, so naturally it was going to put some effort into promoting her next release on the streamer. Bringing out a new album on Apple Music is never just about pressing a button, however.
Ahead of the actual launch on April 19, 2024, the most visible part of Apple Music's work with Swift is in the clues it began dropping on the service. First, Swift worked Apple Music to curate five different playlists that are related to heartbreak.
Then every day beginning on April 13, 2024, one song in one playlist had one change made to its lyrics. The song remains untouched but as spotted by USA Today, the lyrics on Apple Music's version contained random-seeming capital letters in the middle of words.
They weren't random. The six letters hidden for only one day in one playlist's version of her "Glitch" track, spelled out the word "Hereby."
Streaming a new album effectively
At midnight on April 19, "Tortured Poets" will be released. USA Today isn't clear what timezone that midnight release is, but it does say that Apple Music teams on both coasts will be in their office making sure it all goes smoothly.
"We've done so many of these," Rachel Newman, Apple Music's global head of editorial told the publication, "and we've really built a lot of credibility and trust in the artist community."
"We always try to think really deeply about the creative approach that is relative to the concepts of the albums and what the artist is talking about and feeling in the moment," she continues. "And then it's a real collaboration with the artist's team and sometimes directly with the artist about what feels right for them."
As of the time that Apple Music hosted events honoring Taylor Swift as its artist of the year in December 2023, her "Midnights" was the largest album by a female artist in Apple Music history.
Wesley Hilliard
Christine McKee
Malcolm Owen
Amber Neely
18 Comments
And therein lies the core problem with Apple Music: It is to streaming services what Top 40 was to radio in the 80s. Apple is far more concerned with whether Apple Music appears to be aligned with what is "now" than building a vital and comprehensive music service, much less fixing the oft-documented problems with the garbage that is Music.app. The end result is not something that comes across as cool and essential, but rather a bunch of boomers wearing tight-fitting jeans and inviting themselves to industry parties.
Before the Swifties descend upon me like a ton of bricks: Tay-Tay is not, er, my cup of tea, but she's an amazing business person and I don't find her music actively terrible, or anything. It's the form of Apple's myopic partnerships, not the individual artists.
Another example would be the weird amount of attention they kept giving Billie Eilish, who admitted in a couple interviews she found it all "very strange," and that it was entirely a construct between Apple and her record company. She had nothing to do with it, despite Apple continually selling it as a partnership between her, individually, and Apple. Again—boomers in jeans making sure to be seen rather than thinking about: Is this what my users actually want?
Oh, sick burn dude! But sorry, no, squarely Gen X. I own a boutique PR and marketing firm targeted at the independent music industry (among other content sectors), so obviously I have an agenda and a viewpoint, one based on the marketplace I work in and the artists I serve and the reactions from those artists and their record companies I see to how Apple Music does business. Your viewpoints and experiences may be different, and I respect and support that. We're here to have a discussion, right? So you can learn from me and I can learn from you, right?
Oh sorry. Apple Music is the best!
Really doesn’t sound like a lot of actual work.