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Comment by mhomde | Hacker News Reader

Which one do you think is more likely:

a) "Oh gosh, apparently having the artists/labels taking the monetary risk for us for trying to acquire a strategic stranglehold on the music industry was bad, we should do the right thing!"

b) "Argh! the backlash is bigger than we anticipated and Taylor Swift is causing too much negative PR. Quickly, change our minds before our service and future music profits are doomed. We'll make it back some other way somewhere down the line"

Doing the right thing because you have to is better than not doing it I guess, but I tend to measure a company on whether they'd try the same thing again if they could get away with it... and Apple definitively would.

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I think you've missed the point a bit. The third (pretty likely) scenario that you don't mention is that they planned the whole exchange.

That seems highly unlikely, I have a hard time seeing this reflecting well upon Apple, more likely it will leave a sour taste in many people's mouth.

It's not like Apple desperately needs the PR and why risk bad one?

I am not sure how either of you are defining highly likely or unlikely. Have you been in the shoes of the people making the decisions? Have you considered the varying inputs that define the statistical likelihood of the result? I recommend checking out http://rationality.org/workshops/ and perhaps reading http://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes

It's true. I shouldn't have used that word.

Perhaps what I should say is that orchestration seems like a plausible scenario to me. It seems to fit the facts and the outcome benefits both parties.

Planned is probably too strong a word, but I think it's likely that Apple anticipated that there might be pushback on the trial period, so they ready to make a quick change.

Remember when the iPhone debuted at $600 and no subsidy? People said it would never sell at that price. But of course a few did, and then Apple quickly cut the price to $400. Eventually it became $200+subsidy, just like any other smartphone.

Apple seems to start out with their preferred offer and see if it works. If not, they go to the next fallback position. That happens so quickly that it seems clear that they must anticipate it somewhat.

The scenario you give with the iPhone may have been planned marketing as well. It's not that hard to conclude that a $600 dollar cell phone would not sell very well when the iPhone debuted. But releasing it at that price made it "exclusive", creating a lot of consumer desire for the device, then they dropped the price to where people could afford it. So they cashed in on that seed they planted and received a lot of additional news coverage from the price drop.

Apple has teams of people working through this stuff. So while you may be right that it was just a prepared backup plan, it also could've been the plan to begin with.

I'm reminded of the huge success Coke experienced after reintroducing Coca Cola Classic after the disastrous new Coke. When questioned about the whole thing Coke's president Donald Keough said, "Some critics will say Coca-Cola made a marketing mistake. Some cynics will say that we planned the whole thing. The truth is we are not that dumb, and we are not that smart."

I'm not sure what that's actually saying. So they didn't make a mistake?

"We're going to deliberately do something that could piss off most of our musicians, and then backtrack on it. What could go wrong?"

I doubt they tried to plan the whole thing, too much negativity risk involved.

And Swift just happen to complain and withdraw her songs from Spotify, the main company Apple Music is competing against.

Regarding negativity risk. What risk? If you assume they planned this all along then how possibly this could be negative. The only risk they had if they would end up ignoring her.

This was a great PR stunt to make Apple look much better than a competitor and I'm afraid Swift was nothing more than a puppet there.

Do you really think that recording companies would allow Apple to just stream their music without any contracts in place? Or not including something so important as a part of it?

Taylor Swift doesn't have 1989 on any streaming platforms. She also pulled all her music from Spotify because the free tier doesn't pay anything. She has a quite long history at this point of fighting against these streaming services that underpay artists, and encouraging her fans to actually buy her albums.

Why would she be so intent on getting involved with Apple's streaming service?

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