VF interview: Healing Kanye rift
Swift talks to Vanity Fair about how Jay-Z helped her heal the relationship with West.
I feel like I wasn’t ready to be friends with [West] until I felt like he had some sort of respect for me, and he wasn’t ready to be friends with me until he had some sort of respect for me—so it was the same issue, and we both reached the same place at the same time,” Swift says. “I became friends with Jay Z, and I think it was important, for Jay Z, for Kanye and I to get along. . . . And then Kanye and I both reached a place where he would say really nice things about my music and what I’ve accomplished, and I could ask him how his kid’s doing.
NYU Q&A
The rapper, along with Tidal exec Vania Schlogel, holds a Q&A session with students at New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. He talks about how Tidal gives a higher royalty to its artists.
You don’t want to single anyone out, per se — but currently we pay the highest royalty percentage. And there is no free tier service. If you have five people paying for music, and 10 people consuming it, then the artist starts at -5. We start at 1. There is no free tier and we’ll pay the highest royalty percentage. That’s how we’ll change the industry…You guys may have seen some of the stats like, Aloe Blacc had a song that was streamed 168 million times and he got paid $4,000. For us, it’s not us standing here saying we’re poor musicians. If you provide a service, you should be compensated for it.
On the discussion about ‘rich artists’ benefiting:
You never hear Tim Cook’s net worth whenever he tries to sell you something. Steve Jobs, God bless, he had to have been pretty rich — nobody’s ever said, ‘Oh, the rich getting richer! I won’t buy an iPhone!’ Yeah, right. It’s not about being pretentious; again, this is a thing for all artists. You pay $9.99 for Spotify, so why not $9.99 for Tidal? We’re not asking for anything else, we’re just saying that we’ll spread that money to artists more fairly. We’re not saying anything other than that, and we’re saying that we’re in a position to bring light to this issue. We’re using our power that way.
Lucky interview
In an interview in Lucky magazine, Knowles says she’s ready to move on following her fight with Jay-Z.
What’s important is that my family and I are all good. What we had to say collectively was in the statement that we put out, and we all feel at peace with that.
Masterclass
Jay-Z discusses his life, the music business and lessons about both that he has learned along the way. He focuses on the difference between amazing vs. excellence. Also how to be comfortable with yourself.
Belief in oneself and knowing who you are, I mean, that’s the foundation for everything great
O Magazine interview
Jay-Z gives an interview to Oprah for O Magazine about being abandoned by his father when he was 11.
[I felt] Anger. At the whole situation. Because when you’re growing up, your dad is your superhero. Once you’ve let yourself fall that in love with someone, once you put him on such a high pedestal and he lets you down, you never want to experience that pain again. So I remember just being really quiet and really cold. Never wanting to let myself get close to someone like that again. I carried that feeling throughout my life, until my father and I met up before he died.
O Magazine interview
Jay-Z gives his thoughts about why his first album, Reasonable Doubt played a pivotal part in boosting his hip-hop career:
Yes—and that first album, Reasonable Doubt, is my favorite, because all the emotions and experiences of 26 years came out in it. That was the record I had 26 years to make.