Writing this song felt like a musical departure and coming home at the same time. Creating something for Jessie was a new challenge and also felt like second nature all at once. And being a @toystory kid from the age of 5 til now… is an adventure I plan to be on, to infinity and beyond.
Thank you to the brilliant Andrew Stanton for imagining me for this, all those years ago when you wrote this newest film. Thank you to the incomparable @RandyNewman or the gorgeous sonic tapestry of songs and scores you��ve meticulously woven over the years. You created the Toy Story musical world, and we are lucky to get to live in it.
By we, I mean myself and my pal @jackantonoff. We wrote this with so much adoration for these characters that made us laugh and helped us learn lessons and think outside the backyard all throughout our childhoods. “I Knew It, I Knew You” from Toy Story 5 is out everywhere now. 🤠🐴
https://t.co/2JaaQvxHjp
It’s a *Toy* Story 🤠
You knew it! My new original song “I Knew It, I Knew You” for Disney and @Pixar’s @toystory 5 will be yours on June 5th. I’ve always dreamed of getting to write for these characters who I’ve adored since I was a 5 year old kid watching the first Toy Story movie. I fell instantly in love with Toy Story 5 when I was lucky enough to see it in its early stages, and I wrote this song as soon as I got home from the screening. Sometimes you just know, right?
You can pre-order now exclusively at https://t.co/NoneI6kxdH and catch Toy Story 5 in theaters June 19th ☁️☁️☁️☁️☁️
Universal Music is selling $1.4 billion in Spotify shares. It paid nothing for them. Spotify handed the shares over in 2008 just for letting Spotify play music, and the deal was set up so almost none of that money would ever reach the artists who made the music. Taylor Swift's 2018 contract changed that.
Back in 2008, Spotify was a small Swedish startup that needed songs to play. The big record labels had the songs. They had no reason to hand them over cheap, so the two sides cut a deal. Spotify gave them shares. The labels gave Spotify the right to play their music. Universal walked away with 5%. That stake later grew to 7% when Universal bought EMI and rolled EMI's 2% into its own. Then it drifted back to 3% as Spotify took on more investors and shrank everyone's slice. At today's prices, 3% of Spotify is worth about $2.7 billion. Universal sat on those shares for 18 years and never sold a single one. Until yesterday.
Most artists never see royalty money. When a label signs you, it pays you an advance to live on while you make the album. It also covers your studio time, your music videos, your marketing, your tour. All of those costs go on a tab. The label keeps every dollar your music earns until you clear that tab. Berklee, the music school in Boston, says as many as 96% of major-label artists never earn enough to clear it. They stay in the red their entire careers.
Sony moved first in 2018. It sold half its Spotify shares for $768 million and paid $250 million directly to its artists in cash, no matter how much each one still owed. Warner followed a few months later. It sold all of its Spotify shares for $504 million and said $126 million would go to its artists too. Warner played it differently. Most of that money went to pay down what those artists already owed, instead of putting fresh cash in their pockets.
Taylor Swift was negotiating her own deal with Universal that same year. She refused to sign unless Universal put the Sony version of the rule in her contract. Cash to artists, no matter what they owed. She wrote at the time that the clause "meant more to me than any other deal point." Universal had said publicly in March 2018 it would share Spotify money with artists. But it had not put the cash-not-credit rule in writing. Swift's contract, signed eight months later, did.
Universal is finally selling. Hundreds of millions of dollars in cash are about to land in artists' bank accounts, including artists who have spent years or decades in the red and would otherwise get nothing from a sale like this.
Most of those artists have never met Taylor Swift. All of them benefit from a single line she insisted on eight years ago.
i will always prefer this over a performative instagram story.. im sorry but this is what makes a real difference and not posts online to pass peoples morality tests
Talking about songwriting > Talking about anything else. Thank you @joecoscarelli and @nytmag. I had the (NY) Time of my life 😎
📷: Stefan Ruiz
🎥: Joshua Charow
https://t.co/MRodcF5j1n
I’m never going to get tired of her talking about her writing process, loved the detail of her wanting every song to have enough plot points to feel like a book, that aspect of her writing is what makes her my favourite artist, she paints entire universes in under 4 minutes
“All that beauty and tragedy and life’s lessons have led her down this path of unstoppable creativity; she just doesn’t stop, and that is what has turned her into this beautiful young woman who makes magic with everything she touches.” - Stevie Nicks on Taylor Swift
“that dude didn’t write this song, i did.” she’s saying this to you 🫵 misogynistic, stupid people who discredit her work by attributing it to men in her life. she’s the one doing the work, not their loser asses.
Taylor Swift on collaborations:
“I always apply the rule: may the best idea win. I don’t care if it came from you, you, or me. If it’s better, that’s what goes in the song.and I do kind of like it when people challenge me on something. I never want to be with a creator who are afraid that ‘if they have a better idea, they can’t argue with me because it must be my ideas’, I’m never gonna grow that way.”