Breaks Spotify record
Bieber’s What Do You Mean? breaks the record for biggest first week on Spotify, with more than 21 million globally listens., even though only five days have passed. The previous record — 20 million streams — was set last month by One Direction for Drag Me Down. The company says Bieber had a spike in streams after he performed at the MTV Video Music Awards.
VF interview: Talks about Apple letter
Swift talks about her Apple letter in an interview with Vanity Fair.
I wrote the letter at around four A.M. Sometimes I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and I’ll write a song and I can’t sleep until I finish it, and it was like that with the letter.
She says she was nervous to post the letter online, after receiving negative feedback for her Wall Street Journal op-ed that had also advocated for fair compensation in the music industry. She says didn’t tell Borchetta, and the only person she ran it through before publishing was her mother
She’s always going to be the one. I just said, ‘I’m really scared of this letter, but I had to write it. I might not post it, but I had to say it.’
She compares Apples’ response with Spotify’s:
Apple treated me like I was a voice of a creative community that they actually cared about. I found it really ironic that the multi-billion-dollar company reacted to criticism with humility, and the start-up with no cash flow reacted to criticism like a corporate machine.