Apple Music will be the only streaming service with the rights to Taylor Swift's 1989

Taylor Swift
(Image credit: Ross Gilmore/Getty Images for TAS)

Taylor Swift made headlines this week with a single Tumblr post calling out Apple Music's free three-month user trial, which would not pay artists royalties during that time. In less than 24 hours, Apple exec Eddy Cue announced on Twitter that Apple Music would in fact pay its artists even while customers are enjoying the streaming service for free.

Given Swift's well-documented anti-streaming stance, which began with her removing her albums from Spotify last November, speculation arose that Apple's blink-and-you-missed-it change of heart wasn't so much motivated by the desire to do the right thing, but instead by the hope that Swift would bless Apple Music with the rights to her record-breaking album 1989. Swift didn't help that rumor with a series of tweets Thursday:

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Kimberly Alters

Kimberly Alters is the news editor at TheWeek.com. She is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.