I hope everyone realizes that withholding 1989 was about a windowing strategy to maximize overall revenue from iTunes downloads/CD sales. Now they've essentially called her bluff and she'll have to cut that short when her music is still selling like crazy 8 months later.
I don't think she was bluffing as she has already withheld her album from Spotify. If the follow up is correct, she can still withhold it as they are not going to pay full royalties. This is attempted damage control for Apple on a Sunday night and it looks ill handled.
The story then changes from "Taylor Swift making sure artists are compensated for their work" to "Taylor Swift wants more money". Apple was never going to pay royalty rates based on people that paid $10 a month for the service on people that were paying nothing, asking that they do would make Taylor Swift look poorly.
The story changes to Apple is still going to short change artists to promote its service. Taylor Swift will look fine as she has incredible fan loyalty and communicates with her "customers" in a way Apple cannot.
I did and it has nothing to do with this. Tidal has so many problems (e.g. streaming rights to Beyoncé) and relations to other artists that the situations are not similar.
