In the short term, the fight over the cost of music is not about the money.

In the long term, it's absolutely about the money.

Taylor Swift took a stand over the weekend against Apple's plans to offer people a three-month free trial that would yield no money for artists. Less than 24 hours later, the biggest company in the world capitulated. Apple media boss Eddy Cue tweeted that the company would pay for the music streamed during the trail periods.

And thus, musicians have won a major battle against free on-demand music.

The war, however, is far from over.

Singer Taylor Swift attends the SNL 40th Anniversary Special. The singer-songwriter challenged Apple Music and won. Image: Evan Agostini/Associated Press

Swift has become the face of the music industry's pushback against free, on-demand music. She had previously taken a stand against Spotify, removing her music from the platform.

"Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for," she wrote in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal.

This time, it was Apple that drew her rebuke. Swift said it's not about the money for her, but for smaller artists who don't command the same profits or have the same voice.

Thats sounds nice, but even those artists are unlikely to make a living from the pennies that Apple throws them.

"Aside from the Taylor Swifts of the world, three months of royalties for 99.9% of artists is barely enough for a sushi lunch," said Aram Sinnreich, a professor at Rutgers University with a focus on music and technology. "With 30 million songs, consumers are not generating that much revenue for any individual rights holder."

If there's not that much money, why all the squabbling?

Eddy Cue, Apple senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, playing 'Uptown Funk' yet again during an Apple Music demo. Image: Jeff Chiu/Associated Press

Should music ever be free?

The music industry has been at war ever since the early days of the Internet allowed for downloadable music.

It began with the Napster era of piracy, moved into the iTunes era of digital copies and has now begun to confront free on-demand streaming. Along the way, people became used to spending less money on music because they just didn't have to.

Swift makes a compelling case that lagging digital revenue is due to companies like Spotify and Apple devaluing music by giving it away for free.

However, Apple was probably paying something for the trial period — even if Swift didn't believe it was enough.

Image: Midia Analytics

David Touve, a professor at the University of Virginia with a background in digital music startups, said Apple was likely offering some compensation other than per-stream royalties. One way would have been to provide advance payments.

"Some sort of compensation was most likely out there for the free trial period. It might have just not been compensation in the form of direct royalties," Touve said.

What Swift seemed to be taking a stand for is the idea that music should never be free. It's a symbolic victory that has helped further the public perception against free on-demand music.

Pandora's chief technology officer, Tom Conrad, questioned that heroic view.

3/ Swift never pulled from YouTube which is the most popular free service and certainly devalues music if Spotify does. — Tom Conrad (@tconrad) June 22, 2015

"There's no good and evil in this. It's not a moral story," Sinnreich said. "It's just contractual squabbling over who is going to foot the cost of getting listeners interested."

Fear the reaper

The change has almost no impact on Apple aside from losing a few dollars in the near term, but the larger push to minimize free on-demand music is bad news for Spotify.

Spotify, the leader in the streaming music industry, is reliant on its "freemium" model to attract listeners and convert them into paying customers. Spotify now claims 20 million subscribers out of their total 75 million users, double the number of paying customers it had last year.

Unlike Apple, there is no limit on how long a person can use Spotify's free service — which has probably been a contributor to its success.

Spotify founder Daniel Ek, shown in 2009 before his service conquered the U.S. Image: TT/Janerik Henriksson/Associated Press

Meanwhile, other companies that tried to build a streaming music business without the freemium model have had a hard time. In September, Rdio, among the bigger Spotify competitors, began to offer more free music but stopped short of the Spotify model of allowing free on-demand on desktop.

Still, heavy is the head that wears the crown of streaming music.

For Spotify, every artist who pushes back on free digital music is launching an assault on its business model. It's a matter of survival. The company's losses have tripled in the past two years.

"If I were Spotify, I would be very worried about the long-term viability of their free, ad-supported service. I think that the winds of change have come to digital music when it comes to public relations. I think some artists have been very good at generating sympathy among the public for giving them more negotiating power," Sinnreich said.

Sinnreich added that Spotify will particularly need that populist, accessible free tier advantage to compete with powerful competitors like Apple.

"The problem is that without a free ad-supported service, Spotify can't offer stiff competition to the likes of Apple because they don't have deep pockets, and they don't have any other business model to fall back on. Apple has now been using music as a loss leader for now over a decade."

Jimmy Iovine gets a warm greeting from Apple CEO Tim Cook as he takes the stage to announce Apple Music. Image: Mashable, Elizabeth Pierson

A Spotify spokesperson declined to comment.

Bad for Spotify, bad for music?

"At the same time, I would be glad that Apple has shown that there's limits to its negotiating power," Sinnreich said. "And I would be somewhat heartened that Apple doesn't have the ability to steamroll [Spotify] out of the business."

"Freemium has shown to be a compelling way to bring people into a new industry and that goes beyond just music," Touve said. "If freemium hurt the growth rate of paid subscriptions, this may be the sort of pain that, at least for the last few years, 'hurt so good.'"

The argument about freemium is one that Touve expects to persist. Artists and labels may not like free streaming, but it is proving to be successful in growing the overall number of subscribers.

If that continues, the much-derided Spotify — and the popularity of free music — could hold the key to the music industry's survival.