iOS is a one of the major mobile OSs. Updates every year are free. Same of MacOS. Where again is the arrogance?
No they are not free. This cost is included in the monster price of your iPhone. SW upgrade might look free to a dumb user, but every person with a brain will know you pay premium for it!
I like Apple Music a lot (if not iTunes), I do wish they’d make it available lossless over Sonos and the like, or PC/Mac too— especially now I know it’s not about the money...
Im sure there’ll be the usual suspects saying Apples compression logarithms are so good that [...] but Deezer Elite vs Apple Music played for a long time through a hifi is better. Not much better, but enough keep me on that service.
Through Earpods and my watch on a run, I’ll through normal headphones, I couldn’t care less.
Life was sucked out of Rock and Roll by people like Lee Abrams who launched the Superstars format in the 1970s that concentrated on a rather smallish list of established artists and their most popular songs rather than let the audience discover and decide what they wanted. Prior to his consultancy, stations used program directors that listened to the Club DJs, talked to the concert promoters, tabulated local call in requests and their own judgement to determine playlists and rotations. This resulted in a Rock station in New York sounding different from one in Philadelphia and one in Memphis sounding different from one in Atlanta. It also helped keep rock vibrant and similar things happened with country and Soul.
After Superstars delivered large audiences content to hearing mostly the same stuff over and over, the same thing was applied to other formats.
In streaming land, the tech geeks think they can predict what you will like from a relatively short playlist. That may work for some, but not for everyone- especially those with broad and eclectic tastes. We would all be better off returning to a more regionalized playlist where local artists and favorites can gain traction before breaking out nationally.
The one thing that bothers me the most about streaming from whomever is that the artists are not adequately compensated for their work. Peter Frampton recently tweeted this: "For 55 million streams of, ‘Baby I Love Your Way’, I got $1,700".
Apple should pay artists more or get out of streaming.
I pretty much disagree with most of your antiquated views on music and disagree with the notion of Apple getting out of the streaming music business when they're one of the highest payers (looks like third behind Napster and Tidal (neither of which seem very popular which means that Apple is probably a much higher earner for musicians than those two simply by being on Apple Music), but I will say that if Tim Cook is serious about his not being in the music streaming business for the money it would go a long way to prove that by, at the very least, paying artists more per listen than anyone else out there. Personally, I use Spotify and I look forward to it (and SiriusXM) app to show up on the Apple Watch later this year, but if Apple came out with a statement that they were going to, say, triple how much they pay artists I'd sign up right away.
Hmmm, that works out to 0.000030909 cents per stream. Per BGR, this NYT article claims Apple will be paying artists 0.2 cents per stream which works out to $1 for every 500.
Something seems off here. I recall Frampton was a long time holdout to letting his music go digital. Perhaps he’s trying to make things appear worse than they are to justify his holdout stance. Going by The Times’ figures he would have gotten $110,000 for 55 million streams (on Apple Music).
I think I read that Apple was trying to negotiate their rates down, so maybe this isn’t accurate, but I doubt they dropped as far as Frampton claims in that tweet.
Apple is currently paying around .007 cents per stream, less than half the rate you thought. Last year it was closer to .006, and shockingly Google Play Music was paying out more per stream, tho they've taken a big step back this year. Napster is the only one even close to .02/stream at the moment.
Thanks for the updated rates. As I mentioned I thought they had negotiated lower, and the article I linked to was from 2015.
But .007 per stream is still much more than the .00003 Frampton says he’s getting. If that were the case I can’t imagine every artist would just be sitting around, silently suffering. Recall Taylor Swift, who is likely getting many more streams than Peter Frampton is, and who also isn’t quiet about being treat fairly.
Thrang: I am also a fan of most of the bands you mention. Mostly, Apple Music does a great job of finding new stuff for me to listen to, but I think they deliberately throw in a curveball every now and again to prevent your tastes from getting too "samey" (not you, obviously, or me ... but most people's tastes fall into a pretty simple set of core bands/artists.
I have noticed that both Spotify and Apple have trouble with people like me who enjoy very diverse bands. I like Devo, I like Incredible String Band, I like Harold Budd, I like They Might Be Giants, I like Charlie Parker, I like Tiny Tim.
It's like that scene in Star Trek (or Doctor Who before it) where the star feeds a computer a bunch of logical conundrums and it explodes.
Keep pressing that dislike button and providing written feedback when you have time ... the Apple Music team do read the fan mail!
You got me at Incredible String Band and They Might Be Giants. Completely agree that the more diverse the tastes, the greater the difficulty Apple Music has recommending artists who may be interesting and worthy of deeper dives.
Life was sucked out of Rock and Roll by people like Lee Abrams who launched the Superstars format in the 1970s that concentrated on a rather smallish list of established artists and their most popular songs rather than let the audience discover and decide what they wanted. Prior to his consultancy, stations used program directors that listened to the Club DJs, talked to the concert promoters, tabulated local call in requests and their own judgement to determine playlists and rotations. This resulted in a Rock station in New York sounding different from one in Philadelphia and one in Memphis sounding different from one in Atlanta. It also helped keep rock vibrant and similar things happened with country and Soul.
After Superstars delivered large audiences content to hearing mostly the same stuff over and over, the same thing was applied to other formats.
In streaming land, the tech geeks think they can predict what you will like from a relatively short playlist. That may work for some, but not for everyone- especially those with broad and eclectic tastes. We would all be better off returning to a more regionalized playlist where local artists and favorites can gain traction before breaking out nationally.
The one thing that bothers me the most about streaming from whomever is that the artists are not adequately compensated for their work. Peter Frampton recently tweeted this: "For 55 million streams of, ‘Baby I Love Your Way’, I got $1,700".
Apple should pay artists more or get out of streaming.
I pretty much disagree with most of your antiquated views on music and disagree with the notion of Apple getting out of the streaming music business when they're one of the highest payers (looks like third behind Napster and Tidal (neither of which seem very popular which means that Apple is probably a much higher earner for musicians than those two simply by being on Apple Music), but I will say that if Tim Cook is serious about his not being in the music streaming business for the money it would go a long way to prove that by, at the very least, paying artists more per listen than anyone else out there. Personally, I use Spotify and I look forward to it (and SiriusXM) app to show up on the Apple Watch later this year, but if Apple came out with a statement that they were going to, say, triple how much they pay artists I'd sign up right away.
Hmmm, that works out to 0.000030909 cents per stream. Per BGR, this NYT article claims Apple will be paying artists 0.2 cents per stream which works out to $1 for every 500.
Something seems off here. I recall Frampton was a long time holdout to letting his music go digital. Perhaps he’s trying to make things appear worse than they are to justify his holdout stance. Going by The Times’ figures he would have gotten $110,000 for 55 million streams (on Apple Music).
I think I read that Apple was trying to negotiate their rates down, so maybe this isn’t accurate, but I doubt they dropped as far as Frampton claims in that tweet.
Apple is currently paying around .007 cents per stream, less than half the rate you thought. Last year it was closer to .006, and shockingly Google Play Music was paying out more per stream, tho they've taken a big step back this year. Napster is the only one even close to .02/stream at the moment.
Thanks for the updated rates. As I mentioned I thought they had negotiated lower, and the article I linked to was from 2015.
But .007 per stream is still much more than the .00003 Frampton says he’s getting. If that were the case I can’t imagine every artist would just be sitting around, silently suffering. Recall Taylor Swift, who is likely getting many more streams than Peter Frampton is, and who also isn’t quiet about being treat fairly.
What Frampton got is not what the label who controls the rights got.
If you’re really not in it for the money, HOW ABOUT YOU LET VOICE CONTROLS ON THE HOMEPOD CONTROL AN ITUNES LIBRARY OF MUSIC RATHER THAN JUST APPLE MUSIC, THEN.
That’s $350 they’re never going to see from me (hell, I was going to get two of them), because I’m not using streaming services. Ever. Local content, only and always. Fix the HomePod, Apple.
And voice activated equalizer settings! That's my must-have.
Life was sucked out of Rock and Roll by people like Lee Abrams who launched the Superstars format in the 1970s that concentrated on a rather smallish list of established artists and their most popular songs rather than let the audience discover and decide what they wanted. Prior to his consultancy, stations used program directors that listened to the Club DJs, talked to the concert promoters, tabulated local call in requests and their own judgement to determine playlists and rotations. This resulted in a Rock station in New York sounding different from one in Philadelphia and one in Memphis sounding different from one in Atlanta. It also helped keep rock vibrant and similar things happened with country and Soul.
After Superstars delivered large audiences content to hearing mostly the same stuff over and over, the same thing was applied to other formats.
In streaming land, the tech geeks think they can predict what you will like from a relatively short playlist. That may work for some, but not for everyone- especially those with broad and eclectic tastes. We would all be better off returning to a more regionalized playlist where local artists and favorites can gain traction before breaking out nationally.
The one thing that bothers me the most about streaming from whomever is that the artists are not adequately compensated for their work. Peter Frampton recently tweeted this: "For 55 million streams of, ‘Baby I Love Your Way’, I got $1,700".
Apple should pay artists more or get out of streaming.
I pretty much disagree with most of your antiquated views on music and disagree with the notion of Apple getting out of the streaming music business when they're one of the highest payers (looks like third behind Napster and Tidal (neither of which seem very popular which means that Apple is probably a much higher earner for musicians than those two simply by being on Apple Music), but I will say that if Tim Cook is serious about his not being in the music streaming business for the money it would go a long way to prove that by, at the very least, paying artists more per listen than anyone else out there. Personally, I use Spotify and I look forward to it (and SiriusXM) app to show up on the Apple Watch later this year, but if Apple came out with a statement that they were going to, say, triple how much they pay artists I'd sign up right away.
Hmmm, that works out to 0.000030909 cents per stream. Per BGR, this NYT article claims Apple will be paying artists 0.2 cents per stream which works out to $1 for every 500.
Something seems off here. I recall Frampton was a long time holdout to letting his music go digital. Perhaps he’s trying to make things appear worse than they are to justify his holdout stance. Going by The Times’ figures he would have gotten $110,000 for 55 million streams (on Apple Music).
I think I read that Apple was trying to negotiate their rates down, so maybe this isn’t accurate, but I doubt they dropped as far as Frampton claims in that tweet.
Apple is currently paying around .007 cents per stream, less than half the rate you thought. Last year it was closer to .006, and shockingly Google Play Music was paying out more per stream, tho they've taken a big step back this year. Napster is the only one even close to .02/stream at the moment.
Thanks for the updated rates. As I mentioned I thought they had negotiated lower, and the article I linked to was from 2015.
But .007 per stream is still much more than the .00003 Frampton says he’s getting. If that were the case I can’t imagine every artist would just be sitting around, silently suffering. Recall Taylor Swift, who is likely getting many more streams than Peter Frampton is, and who also isn’t quiet about being treat fairly.
What Frampton got is not what the label who controls the rights got.
Can’t we say the same thing about all the other artists who have their catalog available in streaming services? And if that’s not the case, then maybe Frampton should be going back to his label and working a better deal to be more in line with what other artists get.
funny, it's the curation capabilities that drove me back to Spotify. It's AI helped me find countless new bands that I actually like, and I have some varied, bizarre taste in music. Apple Music's human curation on the other hand bombarded me with "popular chart music" regardless of which genre I tried to listen to or which band/track I began with. I haven't listened to the charts since the early 90s and even then as a child I thought it was sh*t.
iOS is a one of the major mobile OSs. Updates every year are free. Same of MacOS. Where again is the arrogance?
No they are not free. This cost is included in the monster price of your iPhone. SW upgrade might look free to a dumb user, but every person with a brain will know you pay premium for it!
Wait, let me try to understand. iPhones can take four or five major iOS updates and therefore have a first-owner productive life of about three years and a second-owner productive life of two more years. The first owner gets the phone with a current version of iOS and updates it twice for no cost, then gets back about 40% of the original price he paid if he sells it after three years of ownership (my own experience), so his total cost of ownership for a phone that is updated annually during his ownership period is 60% of the retail price he originally paid, with a bit of a hit for inflation’s effect on the buying power of the 40% he gets back. And that’s the story for a premium phone experience.
On the other hand, the vast majority of Android phones can’t be updated even once to a major new OS release. Ergo, the cost to upgrade to the next OS release is equal to the entire price of a new Android phone. And the value of a one year old Android is likely no more than half its original price.
When you thnk in terms of total cost of ownership, as anyone with a brain should, the iPhone isn’t expensive and the cost of updating the OS is free. Because the total cost of ownership does not change whether you take the annual update or not.
Well, I wish it were true for me - I like Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel, Talking Heads, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, King Crimson/Robert Fripp, and Aphex Twin among others, and 90% of the "For You" offerings each week suck beyond belief. Why am I still being fed hip-hop or rap which I can't stand? I've set up Apple Music multiple times for genres and artists, and use the Like and Dislike buttons frequently... So the human curators are not doing a very good job of artists and genre matching - or I listen to fairly unique artists!
Same here!
I largely stick to music from my own library. The newer music seems to be mostly a single singer mumbling over top of some electronic noise maker. It's cheap and poorly produced -- or not produced at all...
The best (or worst) example is rap (and its variations). I cannot consider it music, I cannot stand it -- but I can't stop it from showing up on Apple's feeds. There's just no way to block it.
Essentially it seems that "curation" --whether human or mechanical -- has taken over for producing high quality music where the artists are carefully selected and nurtured and their songs are carefully screened, selected and refined until they are high quality music. Instead, now, we have some jerk mumbling into a microphone with an electronic noise maker behind him making his way into my feed.
Not trying to profit? How could Tim even keep a straight face?
There's a big difference between making a profit and being sustainable. The reason why Apple is so successful is because they don't keep money losing ventures around for very long. Other companies are more than happy to allow one product/service suck the profits of another, just to remain viable. This discipline is what Steve Jobs brought to the company when he returned, by cutting of "all the fat".
Furthermore, you don't have to pay an algorithm to create playlists and curate music, you do, however, have to pay humans to continue to do it.
If Tim really loves music, then he'll sign up for Roon with Tidal integration. Supported by heavyweights in the audio industry on the content and the hardware side, you get ture hi-rez audio, and a beautiful user interface that makes it easy and fun to play music again. Makes Apple Music look very sad in comparison. I'd love to hear Tim explain the irony that exists with Apple TV which now does 4k video, yet Apple Music is still stuck not able to support hi-rez music like DSD or MQA. A real lack of humanity there.
If you’re really not in it for the money, HOW ABOUT YOU LET VOICE CONTROLS ON THE HOMEPOD CONTROL AN ITUNES LIBRARY OF MUSIC RATHER THAN JUST APPLE MUSIC, THEN.
That’s $350 they’re never going to see from me (hell, I was going to get two of them), because I’m not using streaming services. Ever. Local content, only and always. Fix the HomePod, Apple.
Yeh, it seems that Apple declared war on the iTunes library when Apple Music came out (or maybe before with "match").
Even when you do migrate your iTunes library into Apple Music, the songs are replaced with Apple's versions -- yeh, it's the same song and same artist, but a different version. I have older songs in my library that got replaced with remakes from 30 years later -- totally different. And, if Apple doesn't have that particular song in its library, it then disappears from yours.
It seems that Apple let its design philosophy -- all streaming, all the time -- take over for common sense. People built those libraries with great care and with great expense. And Apple dumped on them.
Life was sucked out of Rock and Roll by people like Lee Abrams who launched the Superstars format in the 1970s that concentrated on a rather smallish list of established artists and their most popular songs rather than let the audience discover and decide what they wanted. Prior to his consultancy, stations used program directors that listened to the Club DJs, talked to the concert promoters, tabulated local call in requests and their own judgement to determine playlists and rotations. This resulted in a Rock station in New York sounding different from one in Philadelphia and one in Memphis sounding different from one in Atlanta. It also helped keep rock vibrant and similar things happened with country and Soul.
After Superstars delivered large audiences content to hearing mostly the same stuff over and over, the same thing was applied to other formats.
In streaming land, the tech geeks think they can predict what you will like from a relatively short playlist. That may work for some, but not for everyone- especially those with broad and eclectic tastes. We would all be better off returning to a more regionalized playlist where local artists and favorites can gain traction before breaking out nationally.
The one thing that bothers me the most about streaming from whomever is that the artists are not adequately compensated for their work. Peter Frampton recently tweeted this: "For 55 million streams of, ‘Baby I Love Your Way’, I got $1,700".
Apple should pay artists more or get out of streaming.
I pretty much disagree with most of your antiquated views on music and disagree with the notion of Apple getting out of the streaming music business when they're one of the highest payers (looks like third behind Napster and Tidal (neither of which seem very popular which means that Apple is probably a much higher earner for musicians than those two simply by being on Apple Music), but I will say that if Tim Cook is serious about his not being in the music streaming business for the money it would go a long way to prove that by, at the very least, paying artists more per listen than anyone else out there. Personally, I use Spotify and I look forward to it (and SiriusXM) app to show up on the Apple Watch later this year, but if Apple came out with a statement that they were going to, say, triple how much they pay artists I'd sign up right away.
Hmmm, that works out to 0.000030909 cents per stream. Per BGR, this NYT article claims Apple will be paying artists 0.2 cents per stream which works out to $1 for every 500.
Something seems off here. I recall Frampton was a long time holdout to letting his music go digital. Perhaps he’s trying to make things appear worse than they are to justify his holdout stance. Going by The Times’ figures he would have gotten $110,000 for 55 million streams (on Apple Music).
I think I read that Apple was trying to negotiate their rates down, so maybe this isn’t accurate, but I doubt they dropped as far as Frampton claims in that tweet.
Apple is currently paying around .007 cents per stream, less than half the rate you thought. Last year it was closer to .006, and shockingly Google Play Music was paying out more per stream, tho they've taken a big step back this year. Napster is the only one even close to .02/stream at the moment.
Thanks for the updated rates. As I mentioned I thought they had negotiated lower, and the article I linked to was from 2015.
But .007 per stream is still much more than the .00003 Frampton says he’s getting. If that were the case I can’t imagine every artist would just be sitting around, silently suffering. Recall Taylor Swift, who is likely getting many more streams than Peter Frampton is, and who also isn’t quiet about being treat fairly.
What Frampton got is not what the label who controls the rights got.
As the tweet was made with reference to ASCAP, I'm pretty sure he was referring to composers share, not artists.
Life was sucked out of Rock and Roll by people like Lee Abrams who launched the Superstars format in the 1970s that concentrated on a rather smallish list of established artists and their most popular songs...
...
The one thing that bothers me the most about streaming from whomever is that the artists are not adequately compensated for their work. Peter Frampton recently tweeted this: "For 55 million streams of, ‘Baby I Love Your Way’, I got $1,700".
Apple should pay artists more or get out of streaming.
That Frampton quote is telling -- and maybe the heart of what's going wrong with music:
Music used to be carefully produced and distributed and only the quality stuff made it onto your car radio. But, it was a very slow and very expensive process with a lot of people involved.
Now, artists can no longer afford to pay expensive 5-20 piece bands to back them. Nor can they afford professional mixers to mix them. And, without the money, the old time producers are gone -- so the screening & quality control process is gone too...
The result: cheaply "produced" junky music made by some girl sitting in her living room with an MBP and a microphone.
iOS is a one of the major mobile OSs. Updates every year are free. Same of MacOS. Where again is the arrogance?
No they are not free. This cost is included in the monster price of your iPhone. SW upgrade might look free to a dumb user, but every person with a brain will know you pay premium for it!
Wait, let me try to understand. iPhones can take four or five major iOS updates and therefore have a first-owner productive life of about three years and a second-owner productive life of two more years. The first owner gets the phone with a current version of iOS and updates it twice for no cost, then gets back about 40% of the original price he paid if he sells it after three years of ownership (my own experience), so his total cost of ownership for a phone that is updated annually during his ownership period is 60% of the retail price he originally paid, with a bit of a hit for inflation’s effect on the buying power of the 40% he gets back. And that’s the story for a premium phone experience.
On the other hand, the vast majority of Android phones can’t be updated even once to a major new OS release. Ergo, the cost to upgrade to the next OS release is equal to the entire price of a new Android phone. And the value of a one year old Android is likely no more than half its original price.
When you thnk in terms of total cost of ownership, as anyone with a brain should, the iPhone isn’t expensive and the cost of updating the OS is free. Because the total cost of ownership does not change whether you take the annual update or not.
Not to get me wrong, I am not trying to compare to Android here. We are all Apple users at the end. But saying that iPhone software is free is wrong.
Life was sucked out of Rock and Roll by people like Lee Abrams who launched the Superstars format in the 1970s that concentrated on a rather smallish list of established artists and their most popular songs rather than let the audience discover and decide what they wanted. Prior to his consultancy, stations used program directors that listened to the Club DJs, talked to the concert promoters, tabulated local call in requests and their own judgement to determine playlists and rotations. This resulted in a Rock station in New York sounding different from one in Philadelphia and one in Memphis sounding different from one in Atlanta. It also helped keep rock vibrant and similar things happened with country and Soul.
After Superstars delivered large audiences content to hearing mostly the same stuff over and over, the same thing was applied to other formats.
In streaming land, the tech geeks think they can predict what you will like from a relatively short playlist. That may work for some, but not for everyone- especially those with broad and eclectic tastes. We would all be better off returning to a more regionalized playlist where local artists and favorites can gain traction before breaking out nationally.
The one thing that bothers me the most about streaming from whomever is that the artists are not adequately compensated for their work. Peter Frampton recently tweeted this: "For 55 million streams of, ‘Baby I Love Your Way’, I got $1,700".
Apple should pay artists more or get out of streaming.
I pretty much disagree with most of your antiquated views on music and disagree with the notion of Apple getting out of the streaming music business when they're one of the highest payers (looks like third behind Napster and Tidal (neither of which seem very popular which means that Apple is probably a much higher earner for musicians than those two simply by being on Apple Music), but I will say that if Tim Cook is serious about his not being in the music streaming business for the money it would go a long way to prove that by, at the very least, paying artists more per listen than anyone else out there. Personally, I use Spotify and I look forward to it (and SiriusXM) app to show up on the Apple Watch later this year, but if Apple came out with a statement that they were going to, say, triple how much they pay artists I'd sign up right away.
Do you think doubling Frampton's cut from $1,700 for 55 million streams to $3,400 would even begin to make a difference?
No, it is expensive to produce high quality music: You have to pay lead and backup musicians, writers, producers, sound men, mixers, etc.... You just can't do that on a $1,700 budget -- or a $3,400 budget.
Well, I wish it were true for me - I like Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel, Talking Heads, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, King Crimson/Robert Fripp, and Aphex Twin among others, and 90% of the "For You" offerings each week suck beyond belief. Why am I still being fed hip-hop or rap which I can't stand? I've set up Apple Music multiple times for genres and artists, and use the Like and Dislike buttons frequently... So the human curators are not doing a very good job of artists and genre matching - or I listen to fairly unique artists!
I also think the For You kinda sucks… In the beginning of the service, I got a few lovely suggestions, but now it's just commercial garbage. I'm starting to think it has to do with my listening habits, and my dislike for the concepts of "genres". I've therefore started to "dislike" songs that I don't like, to kinda teach Apple Music more about what I like and don't like. But "love" and "dislike" would be better off if presented on the face of the playing song, rather than in the sub-menu, if it has a big influence on how music is presented to me.
Making lovely playlists is so much more than genres and popularity. I think what Apple should be doing is to open up about the identity of their curators, and create a whole new category called curators/ DJ's/ music programmers or something. Then we can find our favourite curators and stick with them. I'm finding it a bit fuzzy how to find playlists on Apple Music. Once in a while I'm finding someone I like, and try to follow them, but it's a bit mysterious.
"Genres" was another casualty of Apple's war on the personal digital library.
One thing I enjoyed was putting on "80's soft jazz" or "Christmas music" -- all genres that I had carefully assigned songs to in my library. When Apple migrated my library into the cloud, they not only replaced the individual songs with their own versions but eliminated the genre's I had carefully assigned. And, their own replacements are meaningless to me. They hold no value.
Life was sucked out of Rock and Roll by people like Lee Abrams who launched the Superstars format in the 1970s that concentrated on a rather smallish list of established artists and their most popular songs rather than let the audience discover and decide what they wanted. Prior to his consultancy, stations used program directors that listened to the Club DJs, talked to the concert promoters, tabulated local call in requests and their own judgement to determine playlists and rotations. This resulted in a Rock station in New York sounding different from one in Philadelphia and one in Memphis sounding different from one in Atlanta. It also helped keep rock vibrant and similar things happened with country and Soul.
After Superstars delivered large audiences content to hearing mostly the same stuff over and over, the same thing was applied to other formats.
In streaming land, the tech geeks think they can predict what you will like from a relatively short playlist. That may work for some, but not for everyone- especially those with broad and eclectic tastes. We would all be better off returning to a more regionalized playlist where local artists and favorites can gain traction before breaking out nationally.
The one thing that bothers me the most about streaming from whomever is that the artists are not adequately compensated for their work. Peter Frampton recently tweeted this: "For 55 million streams of, ‘Baby I Love Your Way’, I got $1,700".
Apple should pay artists more or get out of streaming.
I pretty much disagree with most of your antiquated views on music and disagree with the notion of Apple getting out of the streaming music business when they're one of the highest payers (looks like third behind Napster and Tidal (neither of which seem very popular which means that Apple is probably a much higher earner for musicians than those two simply by being on Apple Music), but I will say that if Tim Cook is serious about his not being in the music streaming business for the money it would go a long way to prove that by, at the very least, paying artists more per listen than anyone else out there. Personally, I use Spotify and I look forward to it (and SiriusXM) app to show up on the Apple Watch later this year, but if Apple came out with a statement that they were going to, say, triple how much they pay artists I'd sign up right away.
Hmmm, that works out to 0.000030909 cents per stream. Per BGR, this NYT article claims Apple will be paying artists 0.2 cents per stream which works out to $1 for every 500.
Something seems off here. I recall Frampton was a long time holdout to letting his music go digital. Perhaps he’s trying to make things appear worse than they are to justify his holdout stance. Going by The Times’ figures he would have gotten $110,000 for 55 million streams (on Apple Music).
I think I read that Apple was trying to negotiate their rates down, so maybe this isn’t accurate, but I doubt they dropped as far as Frampton claims in that tweet.
Apple is currently paying around .007 cents per stream, less than half the rate you thought. Last year it was closer to .006, and shockingly Google Play Music was paying out more per stream, tho they've taken a big step back this year. Napster is the only one even close to .02/stream at the moment.
Thanks for the updated rates. As I mentioned I thought they had negotiated lower, and the article I linked to was from 2015.
But .007 per stream is still much more than the .00003 Frampton says he’s getting. If that were the case I can’t imagine every artist would just be sitting around, silently suffering. Recall Taylor Swift, who is likely getting many more streams than Peter Frampton is, and who also isn’t quiet about being treat fairly.
What Frampton got is not what the label who controls the rights got.
As the tweet was made with reference to ASCAP, I'm pretty sure he was referring to composers share, not artists.
That’s interesting. If that’s the case I’m curious to know what his artist’s share is.
Also, does anyone know why they were talking to “Washington”?
I think Cook is misinformed about AI. An AI that can beat Go’s best players are most likely can recommend a better music with better “soul” than most music curators that Apple can hire. I am worried about Apple’s AI effort if its CEO is this misinformed.
That’s where you are wrong. AI has only certain deep thinking capabilities ,not general ones like the ones in our brains.
Comments
Im sure there’ll be the usual suspects saying Apples compression logarithms are so good that [...] but Deezer Elite vs Apple Music played for a long time through a hifi is better. Not much better, but enough keep me on that service.
Through Earpods and my watch on a run, I’ll through normal headphones, I couldn’t care less.
But .007 per stream is still much more than the .00003 Frampton says he’s getting. If that were the case I can’t imagine every artist would just be sitting around, silently suffering. Recall Taylor Swift, who is likely getting many more streams than Peter Frampton is, and who also isn’t quiet about being treat fairly.
On the other hand, the vast majority of Android phones can’t be updated even once to a major new OS release. Ergo, the cost to upgrade to the next OS release is equal to the entire price of a new Android phone. And the value of a one year old Android is likely no more than half its original price.
When you thnk in terms of total cost of ownership, as anyone with a brain should, the iPhone isn’t expensive and the cost of updating the OS is free. Because the total cost of ownership does not change whether you take the annual update or not.
The best (or worst) example is rap (and its variations). I cannot consider it music, I cannot stand it -- but I can't stop it from showing up on Apple's feeds. There's just no way to block it.
There's a big difference between making a profit and being sustainable. The reason why Apple is so successful is because they don't keep money losing ventures around for very long. Other companies are more than happy to allow one product/service suck the profits of another, just to remain viable. This discipline is what Steve Jobs brought to the company when he returned, by cutting of "all the fat".
Furthermore, you don't have to pay an algorithm to create playlists and curate music, you do, however, have to pay humans to continue to do it.
It seems that Apple let its design philosophy -- all streaming, all the time -- take over for common sense. People built those libraries with great care and with great expense. And Apple dumped on them.
No, it is expensive to produce high quality music: You have to pay lead and backup musicians, writers, producers, sound men, mixers, etc.... You just can't do that on a $1,700 budget -- or a $3,400 budget.
Also, does anyone know why they were talking to “Washington”?