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That's during the free trial period. The higher rates remain once people are paid subscribers.

by IBM 11y ago

JohnTHaller 11y ago
Right. But the trial could be significantly lower. They're not saying. It's worth nothing that by "higher rates" we are talking about a hundredth of a cent per stream.
- IBM 11y ago
  Aren't you forgetting that this was about making sure artists were compensated for their work? That's been now met. Apple isn't going to offer them the same rate they would get when people paid for the service when they aren't just like Spotify doesn't pay premium-tier royalties on their free-tier users.
- culturestate 11y ago
  I'm sure the new trial rates will be broadly similar to Spotify's per-stream rates, which average[1] between $0.006 and $0.0084. Apple Music has no advertising; you can't pay a percentage of revenue that doesn't exist. 1. http://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained/ http://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained/
  - pluma 11y ago
    They're licensing the music. Whether they make any revenue or not doesn't matter. You can't hand out other people's stuff for free and then refuse to pay anything because you didn't make any money from it. And I'm saying that as someone who thinks the current copyright system is incredibly broken.
    - nedwin 11y ago
      Likewise an artist can choose not to have their music on the service.
      - pluma 11y ago
        That point is valid, but Apple is trying to create a de-facto monopoly and even now it's really an oligopoly (which is only marginally better but in many ways worse). In such situations the power balance shifts dramatically and for many artists the choice they have is philosophical at best.
      - JohnTHaller 11y ago
        Unless Apple threatens to remove their music from iTunes if they don't agree to be on Apple Music as a few indie artists have publicly stated.
      - orkoden 11y ago
        Unless the contract with their label says otherwise.
    - culturestate 11y ago
      I mentioned that only to illustrate why they'll likely be paying a flat fee during the trial, rather than a percentage of the (non-existent) revenue.
    - bedhead 11y ago
      They are not handing out music for free. They incur costs, such as IT costs, marketing costs, plus the costs of having amassed hundred of millions of users. You could just as easily turn your argument around: the musicians incur zero costs for putting their music on Apple Music.
      - james_pm 11y ago
        So did record stores. They had rent, signage, advertising, staff salaries and electricity bills to pay. You can't say because we have costs to sell your music, that we should be able to take those costs and pass them to the music artist and consider that payment for their product.
        bedhead 11y ago
        Except they aren't passing any costs to artists. There is exactly zero marginal cost for artists. Artists make their music available for free for a mere three months in exchange for Apple making a massive investment in the service. Keep in mind that 99.9% of artists don't even make any real money from streaming royalties anyway, especially during such a small window! And if customers like the service, they'll pay and presumably be members, as part of the world's most powerful ecosystem, with higher royalty rates than other services, backed by a deep-pocketed company that will promote the living hell out of it. How is this a bad thing??
        pluma 11y ago
        That would be relevant if record stores charged artists for their operational costs. It doesn't matter how much money you make. You're using someone else's property and that's what you pay license fees for. Although I generally object the equivalence of physical and intellectual property -- this isn't any different from selling physical goods: If you want to give a thousand records away practically for free, you still have to buy the thousand records and the producer has no obligation to give you a discount just because you're not going to make money with it. Not even if you have to pay for the cars to pick up and drop off the records and the wages of the people delivering the records. If you want to burn your own money, nobody is stopping you. But don't ask other people to add their money to the pyre for free.
    - misnome 11y ago
      You can if that is the terms by which you licensed the music.
- gpickett00 11y ago
  Why is that "worth noting"? Is that an unfair rate? If so, what is fair? Your implication is that "about a hundreth of a cent" per stream is not fair.
  - danoprey 11y ago
    I think it was a typo and meant to be "worth noting"
  - JohnTHaller 11y ago
    It was a typo meant to be "worth noting". Many people have bandied about Apple's "higher rate" than Spotify, but the difference is likely to be only one hundredth of a cent per stream. Apple will pay out 71.5% of their $9.99 fee vs the 70% that Spotify does. An extra $0.15 a month per subscriber divided by all streams works out to about one hundredth of a cent per stream difference. So, a popular artist's paycheck for millions of plays of their song would be $10,200 vs $10,000 using the typical average streaming payout of a little over 1/2 a cent per play. Plus, there's the fact that Apple Music will cannibalize a lot more iTunes sales than Spotify does.
- MCRed 11y ago
  Yep. And it appears that the Artists, like the music industry, really don't get that things have changed. Hey, I'm old school. I can identify with them. I like to buy my music. I don't get subscriptions where if I stop playing I can't listen to anything.... but I find myself listening to podcasts-- 2 hour long podcast of EDM. My favorite one has several YEARS of podcasts and despite skipping months at a time I'm still over a year behind. I'm not paying them anything[1], they're not paying the artists anything (it's meant for promotion more than anything else.) I did buy an album once. So, even though my habits are different the industry has changed. Apple is progressive. The whole point of the free trial is to get people addicted to the service. In the long run Taylor Swift will make more money from a free trial than if Apple offered the service without a free trial-- because more people will sign up and ultimately end up with royalties going to Taylor. I think it's hilarious that Apple is (as ever, of course) portrayed as the bogeyman for trying to market a service that will make the artists more money. Just like they are constantly derided for taking %30 of revenue (which is a huge improvement over the often %95 and worse terms that you had to accept before the iPhone came out). Things have changed. I'll try this service and see if it changes my habits. If Tayler didn't make out from it in 6 months then go ahead, complain away and have some data to back it up. But making a big to do about it now is kinda silly. Like people being mad that Apple gave them a free U2 album. Sure they handled it clunky and If they do it again I'm sure they will be better. But OH! Apple gave me free music! #FirstWorldProblems [1] near as I can tell, it's a record label that puts out the podcast and I think it's their artists they're putting in it.
  - laumars 11y ago
    EDM follows a different model that has existed since the birth of house et al DJs: demo sets are given away free because: 1) most producers are DJs as well, and often (or at least historically) singles were used as much to promote the DJ as they were a revenue stream. 2) the few producers that weren't DJs were also engineers for other DJs who weren't very good in the studio. Thus they made their money engineering 3) most clubbers wouldn't be interested in a 7 minute unmixed single of their favourite club track. So the single sales generally go to other DJs (and there's thousands of DJs who never make it out of their bedroom - so the DJ scene is considerably bigger than it sounds). The modern EDM scene is likely a little different these days since many EDM DJs are now also pop artists. But I think they still essentially follow this model.

That's during the free trial period. The higher rates remain once people are paid subscribers.

by IBM 11y ago

That's during the free trial period. The higher rates remain once people are paid subscribers.

Right. But the trial could be significantly lower. They're not saying. It's worth nothing that by "higher rates" we are talking about a hundredth of a cent per stream.

IBM 11y ago
Aren't you forgetting that this was about making sure artists were compensated for their work? That's been now met. Apple isn't going to offer them the same rate they would get when people paid for the service when they aren't just like Spotify doesn't pay premium-tier royalties on their free-tier users.
culturestate 11y ago
I'm sure the new trial rates will be broadly similar to Spotify's per-stream rates, which average[1] between $0.006 and $0.0084. Apple Music has no advertising; you can't pay a percentage of revenue that doesn't exist. 1. http://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained/ http://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained/
- pluma 11y ago
  They're licensing the music. Whether they make any revenue or not doesn't matter. You can't hand out other people's stuff for free and then refuse to pay anything because you didn't make any money from it. And I'm saying that as someone who thinks the current copyright system is incredibly broken.
  - nedwin 11y ago
    Likewise an artist can choose not to have their music on the service.
    - pluma 11y ago
      That point is valid, but Apple is trying to create a de-facto monopoly and even now it's really an oligopoly (which is only marginally better but in many ways worse). In such situations the power balance shifts dramatically and for many artists the choice they have is philosophical at best.
    - JohnTHaller 11y ago
      Unless Apple threatens to remove their music from iTunes if they don't agree to be on Apple Music as a few indie artists have publicly stated.
    - orkoden 11y ago
      Unless the contract with their label says otherwise.
  - culturestate 11y ago
    I mentioned that only to illustrate why they'll likely be paying a flat fee during the trial, rather than a percentage of the (non-existent) revenue.
  - bedhead 11y ago
    They are not handing out music for free. They incur costs, such as IT costs, marketing costs, plus the costs of having amassed hundred of millions of users. You could just as easily turn your argument around: the musicians incur zero costs for putting their music on Apple Music.
    - james_pm 11y ago
      So did record stores. They had rent, signage, advertising, staff salaries and electricity bills to pay. You can't say because we have costs to sell your music, that we should be able to take those costs and pass them to the music artist and consider that payment for their product.
      - bedhead 11y ago
        Except they aren't passing any costs to artists. There is exactly zero marginal cost for artists. Artists make their music available for free for a mere three months in exchange for Apple making a massive investment in the service. Keep in mind that 99.9% of artists don't even make any real money from streaming royalties anyway, especially during such a small window! And if customers like the service, they'll pay and presumably be members, as part of the world's most powerful ecosystem, with higher royalty rates than other services, backed by a deep-pocketed company that will promote the living hell out of it. How is this a bad thing??
        pluma 11y ago
        That would be relevant if record stores charged artists for their operational costs. It doesn't matter how much money you make. You're using someone else's property and that's what you pay license fees for. Although I generally object the equivalence of physical and intellectual property -- this isn't any different from selling physical goods: If you want to give a thousand records away practically for free, you still have to buy the thousand records and the producer has no obligation to give you a discount just because you're not going to make money with it. Not even if you have to pay for the cars to pick up and drop off the records and the wages of the people delivering the records. If you want to burn your own money, nobody is stopping you. But don't ask other people to add their money to the pyre for free.
  - misnome 11y ago
    You can if that is the terms by which you licensed the music.
gpickett00 11y ago
Why is that "worth noting"? Is that an unfair rate? If so, what is fair? Your implication is that "about a hundreth of a cent" per stream is not fair.
- danoprey 11y ago
  I think it was a typo and meant to be "worth noting"
- JohnTHaller 11y ago
  It was a typo meant to be "worth noting". Many people have bandied about Apple's "higher rate" than Spotify, but the difference is likely to be only one hundredth of a cent per stream. Apple will pay out 71.5% of their $9.99 fee vs the 70% that Spotify does. An extra $0.15 a month per subscriber divided by all streams works out to about one hundredth of a cent per stream difference. So, a popular artist's paycheck for millions of plays of their song would be $10,200 vs $10,000 using the typical average streaming payout of a little over 1/2 a cent per play. Plus, there's the fact that Apple Music will cannibalize a lot more iTunes sales than Spotify does.
MCRed 11y ago
Yep. And it appears that the Artists, like the music industry, really don't get that things have changed. Hey, I'm old school. I can identify with them. I like to buy my music. I don't get subscriptions where if I stop playing I can't listen to anything.... but I find myself listening to podcasts-- 2 hour long podcast of EDM. My favorite one has several YEARS of podcasts and despite skipping months at a time I'm still over a year behind. I'm not paying them anything[1], they're not paying the artists anything (it's meant for promotion more than anything else.) I did buy an album once. So, even though my habits are different the industry has changed. Apple is progressive. The whole point of the free trial is to get people addicted to the service. In the long run Taylor Swift will make more money from a free trial than if Apple offered the service without a free trial-- because more people will sign up and ultimately end up with royalties going to Taylor. I think it's hilarious that Apple is (as ever, of course) portrayed as the bogeyman for trying to market a service that will make the artists more money. Just like they are constantly derided for taking %30 of revenue (which is a huge improvement over the often %95 and worse terms that you had to accept before the iPhone came out). Things have changed. I'll try this service and see if it changes my habits. If Tayler didn't make out from it in 6 months then go ahead, complain away and have some data to back it up. But making a big to do about it now is kinda silly. Like people being mad that Apple gave them a free U2 album. Sure they handled it clunky and If they do it again I'm sure they will be better. But OH! Apple gave me free music! #FirstWorldProblems [1] near as I can tell, it's a record label that puts out the podcast and I think it's their artists they're putting in it.
- laumars 11y ago
  EDM follows a different model that has existed since the birth of house et al DJs: demo sets are given away free because: 1) most producers are DJs as well, and often (or at least historically) singles were used as much to promote the DJ as they were a revenue stream. 2) the few producers that weren't DJs were also engineers for other DJs who weren't very good in the studio. Thus they made their money engineering 3) most clubbers wouldn't be interested in a 7 minute unmixed single of their favourite club track. So the single sales generally go to other DJs (and there's thousands of DJs who never make it out of their bedroom - so the DJ scene is considerably bigger than it sounds). The modern EDM scene is likely a little different these days since many EDM DJs are now also pop artists. But I think they still essentially follow this model.