Taylor Swift Is the Queen of the Internet

For anyone surprised by Taylor Swift's show of force against Apple over the weekend, hi! Welcome to Earth. More specifically, welcome to the Internet, where Swift benevolently rules over all.

By now you should know that Apple announced that its new music streaming service would come with a three-month free trial following the launch. Yay! But during those first three months of free-for-all promotional service, Apple would be withholding royalties from the artists being streamed. Boo! Obviously this pissed off a lot of people, because that's an inexplicably shrewd move for a company recently touted as the first ever $700 billion enterprise. Yes, that's way too close to one trillion dollars for a company to be penny-pinching. Imagine your employer withholding your checks for three months and saying you should be grateful because they still make you come to the office every day. And that your employer has the reserves of the United States Mint.

Anyway, like we said: This played very poorly as a PR move. Indie labels that hadn't signed deals yet with Apple were already upset about terms of the new service they considered unfair, and this withholding of money for three months just made the situation worse. Smaller artists and their representative bodies were upset, but whatever. Apple does what Apple is going to do, because it's basically a country. But then on Sunday, Taylor Swift flipped the safety cap on her Big Red Button and launched a Tumblr nuke at Cupertino, at which point we all got to watch as one global superpower got cowed by an even bigger one—in the form a 25-year-old pop star.

The origin of the missile was Swiftopia, a rapidly expanding polis located within the Internet (and possibly a pearlescent cloud-city floating somewhere in the high stratosphere, but this is unconfirmed), presided over by its benevolent Empress, Taylor Swift. On her Tumblr page, Swift posted an entry titled "To Apple, With Love," which would prove to be a deliciously passive-aggressive gateway into the mogul's imminent (and intimidatingly polite) evisceration of Apple's miserly policy. In the post Swift wrote that she would be holding back her massive album 1989 from Apple Music due to unjust compensation for artists, and the company should be ashamed for forcing her to do so.

"I find it to be shocking, disappointing, and completely unlike this historically progressive and generous company," Swift wrote, adding that "these are not the complaints of a spoiled, petulant child. These are the echoed sentiments of every artist, writer and producer in my social circles who are afraid to speak up publicly because we admire and respect Apple so much. We simply do not respect this particular call."

The goodwill building and empathy rallying was classic Swift, setting her up perfectly for the coup de grace: "I think this could be the platform that gets it right. But I say to Apple with all due respect, it's not too late to change this policy and change the minds of those in the music industry who will be deeply and gravely affected by this. We don't ask you for free iPhones. Please don't ask us to provide you with our music for no compensation."

Less than 24 hours after Swift published her open letter, Apple capitulated. Boom. Target neutralized.

Swift is all taken care of and she knows it. Her post was about the little guys, the people Swift has made a career speaking for and speaking to over the past 10 years. After a decade of building her empire from the flat ground up to that cloud city we're sure exists somewhere, Swift knew she had the power to demand compensation on behalf of her less influential peers. And she got it.

If you're still not convinced about how much pull Swift has as an economic enterprise and cultural power player, consider Apple senior vice president of Internet software and services Eddy Cue's direct reaction to her letter, which he shared with the Associated Press, "When I woke up this morning and I saw Taylor's note that she had written, it really solidified that we needed to make a change." And after he had his morning realization, he personally contacted Swift to talk it out, "She was very pleased to see that we would give her a call right away and have a discussion."

In return for this overture and subsequent policy reversal, Swift tweeted "I am elated and relieved. Thank you for your words of support today. They listened to us." That Tweet was subsequently favorited more than 52,000 times, and generated more than 18,000 retweets, which is impressive until you compare it to the 63,000 favorites and 38,000 retweets her initial Tumblr post drummed up. When it comes to Swift, every victory belongs to the team, the #SwiftSquad, and Billboard posted that artists like Jack Antonoff and Christina Perri were "applauding" her open letter to the mighty house of Mac. But for all Swift's deference to the power of the whole, Taylor Swift is the one who got Apple to change the course of its massive ship just one week before its landmark streaming endeavor debuts.

Taylor Swift did that, and she did it with social media.

Platforms like Twitter and Tumblr and Instagram are huge for burgeoning artists hustling to launch a career. They provide free and utterly customized news delivery and add the bonus of connecting artists directly to their fans. They can build relationships and act as their own PR service. Swift knows this, because she, like hundreds of other musicians, was using MySpace to do grassroots marketing back in the mid-2000s. The level of success Swift has achieved since that time is unfathomable. She's the 1 percent of the 1 percent, but no matter how high her star rises, Swift continues to utilize the platforms available to her to absolute maximum effect.

Fans fortunate enough to get caught up in her #Taylurking have been rewarded with holiday gift bounties, wedding shower surprises, unannounced home visits and invitations to secret listening sessions. She has repeatedly taken to Instagram and left inspiring messages for fans in their photo comments. Regardless of how you categorize this activity—laser-focused marketing, boundless altruism, self-serving PR, preternaturally keen business savvy, etc.—it works. It really, really works, because when Swift goes on the offensive and pulls music from popular distribution outlets, her fans don't balk and decry her for being selfish. They rally and follow her to wherever she takes her goods.

We know this for certain because Swift's open letter to Apple wasn't the first time she's hurled an explosive at a popular distribution service. In July of last year she made the decision to leave Spotify, and penned an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal explaining why: "My hope for the future, not just in the music industry, but in every young girl I meet ... is that they all realize their worth and ask for it." She added a declaration that would be echoed almost exactly one year later in her letter to Apple.

"Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for. It's my opinion that music should not be free." Apple can't say it wasn't warned. Swift had issued her clarion call, and one year later, she would hold to account the service that no doubt benefited from her Spotify exit last summer. Taylor giveth to Apple, but if Apple does not come correct, Taylor will taketh away. And with nearly 60 million followers standing behind her and the top selling album of both 2014 and 2015 in her hand, even Apple can't look past her calls for action.

And the key difference of note between Swift's Spotify departure and her announcement to withhold 1989 from Apple Music is the medium through which it was delivered. Last year, Swift used the Journal as her bullhorn. It caused a stir. It was lauded by fellow artists. And it was an unbelievably bold stance for a 24-year-old to take, bowing out of the preeminent music streaming service long before Tidal made it (semi-)fashionable to do so. But for her challenge to Apple, Swift didn't need the Journal or The New York Times or Rolling Stone. All she needed was a Tumblr login with an auto-post to Twitter. In the process of proving she was autonomously big enough to get the personal ear of Apple and get it to change its operations policy, she also proved that she's made conventional media outlets obsolete.

Quite simply: Taylor Swift is the Internet, optimized, and Swiftopia is a digital safe space for those who have pledged allegiance to the SwiftSquad. There is nothing a magazine or a newspaper or a website could do for Taylor that she can't do for herself better and faster. Taylor Swift fans don't have to wait for the next big cover story for all the latest deets about their favorite star, because they just follow her on Tumblr. She didn't need a partnership with MTV to tease her "Bad Blood" music video before it premiered at the Billboard Music Awards (as the night's opening performance), because she has nearly 35 million Instagram followers clamoring to like and share the deluge of character posters she used to tease the video event. And Twitter got in on the act, too, creating a custom emoji of a Band-Aid with a bullet hole through it that popped up if you typed #BadBloodMusicVideo. You know what else has gotten custom emojis? Star Wars: The Force Awakens and the NBA Finals—just little underdog properties that we can all get behind.

This is all possible because Swift just gets the Internet. When she made her Tumblr debut she did it by wrapping herself into the Taylor-based meme "No, it's Becky." The headline over at The Cut was "Taylor Swift Achieves Meme-Ception." She fills her social media feeds with her Scottish fold cats and her legion of famous friends and updates about how great her fans are. She sasses tabloids when the opportunity presents itself, soliciting shouts of "YAAAAASSSS KWEEEEN" from her devoted masses.

The denizens of Swiftopia are at her whim, and the way she got Apple to kiss the ring on Sunday proved that big business and big media are now living under her reign as well. She's a singer, a songwriter, a feminist, a lobbyist, and thanks to her social media domination, she has solidified her evolution to vertically integrated marketing and communications firm. Last year, Bloomberg ran a cover story about Swift called "Taylor Swift Is The Music Industry," and while that statement is correct, it's also incomplete, because more than that, Taylor Swift is the harnessed power of the Internet—a lesson Apple just learned in a very public way.

And damn, we would absolutely love to talk to Swift about all this, but who needs a journalist when you've got that Tumblr?