I guess it is really depends on the market. Before internet, radio and tv station is pretty much the only way to promote your song to the mass.
Back "in the day", touring supported the sale of records. Now it's pretty much the opposite, with downloads and streaming supporting (soon, I hope) live shows where the artists can make money from ticket sales and merch.
It's such a shame that apple could not have done with TV/movies what they did with music.
That is, access to almost ALL content at a reasonable price for users and fair payment to creators, with Apple doing a tad better than break even on the service, viewing it mostly as a means of attaching folks to the ecosystem. That would be so much better than all of these separate services.
When Apple Music launched I thought they would create an Apple Records for artists. This would have worked if they can pay the artists more on their platform.
I thought this would happen because Jimmy and Dre were employed. They are known for creating big artists and huge labels.
1. Apple Records is the Beatles' label, created back in the 60s. They're not giving that up, which was made clear in litigation that had to be hammered out back when Apple computers first started entering the music arena and therefore potentially treading on the Beatles' trademark.
2. Apple Music launched as the streaming service version of iTunes, which is a store that carries music from all major labels, plus independents. There's not much reason for them to create their own vanity record label to compete with all that. They could perhaps have tried to grab some major artists for exclusive distribution rights, but that would sour deals they need to make with other major labels for the overall streaming service. There's too much conflict of interest built into trying to do both things, which would make the whole operation less competitive.
The problem Apple’s streaming service has with attracting mote subscribers to compete with Spotify, appears to me to be that, unlike Spotify, Apple Music wants to access my existing music library and replace it with their own versions. Ostensibly replacing poor quality compressed versions with a higher quality version. But in practice Apple Music simply messed up my music collection by confusing versions, messing up album names and artwork and simply removing songs it or artists it didn’t recognise. I loved the streaming service but it was a disaster for my existing library. Took me ages to fix. So unless they offer a simple streaming service like Spotify, without simultaneously trying to manage my existing music library, I won’t be subscribing. Does anyone know if they have fixed that problem?
Yeah. I don't use Apple Music for that reason. I do use iTunes Match however. That way I don't have to fill up my phone or laptop with 15K songs, a lot of which are not commercially available.
It's such a shame that apple could not have done with TV/movies what they did with music.
That is, access to almost ALL content at a reasonable price for users and fair payment to creators, with Apple doing a tad better than break even on the service, viewing it mostly as a means of attaching folks to the ecosystem. That would be so much better than all of these separate services.
When Apple Music launched I thought they would create an Apple Records for artists. This would have worked if they can pay the artists more on their platform.
I thought this would happen because Jimmy and Dre were employed. They are known for creating big artists and huge labels.
1. Apple Records is the Beatles' label, created back in the 60s. They're not giving that up, which was made clear in litigation that had to be hammered out back when Apple computers first started entering the music arena and therefore potentially treading on the Beatles' trademark.
2. Apple Music launched as the streaming service version of iTunes, which is a store that carries music from all major labels, plus independents. There's not much reason for them to create their own vanity record label to compete with all that. They could perhaps have tried to grab some major artists for exclusive distribution rights, but that would sour deals they need to make with other major labels for the overall streaming service. There's too much conflict of interest built into trying to do both things, which would make the whole operation less competitive.
The problem Apple’s streaming service has with attracting mote subscribers to compete with Spotify, appears to me to be that, unlike Spotify, Apple Music wants to access my existing music library and replace it with their own versions. Ostensibly replacing poor quality compressed versions with a higher quality version. But in practice Apple Music simply messed up my music collection by confusing versions, messing up album names and artwork and simply removing songs it or artists it didn’t recognise. I loved the streaming service but it was a disaster for my existing library. Took me ages to fix. So unless they offer a simple streaming service like Spotify, without simultaneously trying to manage my existing music library, I won’t be subscribing. Does anyone know if they have fixed that problem?
Yeah. I don't use Apple Music for that reason. I do use iTunes Match however. That way I don't have to fill up my phone or laptop with 15K songs, a lot of which are not commercially available.
I don’t use Apple Music and Music.app still manages to garble parts of my music library on a semi-regular basis. Even albums bought from the iTunes Store sometimes display twice, with half the tracks in one and half the other, album art gets messed up, and going to the Beatles box set is a roll of the dice about what albums will appear sensibly, and which ones will be a complete mess.
Apple’s music library management has been pretty crappy for years.
Apple is writing to artists on Apple Music, saying it pays a penny per stream, and that 52% of subscription revenue goes to them via record labels. ..................
"Artists should be paid for their work," she said at the time. "Creators should be paid for their work. From our standpoint, the most important thing is to have a healthy overall creative ecosystem that's sustainable into the long term."
The thing that strikes me the most about this paying the artist .... " a penny per stream" is that by using just simple math, how. on the average, little people are streaming music on a paid service. And I don't mean small people.
Using just simple math and just the "penny per stream plus about 50% of revenue goes to the artist (label), that comes to an average of 500 streams per month per subscriber.
If an average of 50% ($5.00) of the $10.00 a month subscription revenue goes to the artist (label), at $.01 per stream, that comes to an average of 500 streams per month per subscriber. Or 17 steams a day. Or about an average of 1 hour of streaming a day. (unless one is streaming classical)
Then one has to throw into the calculation that the streaming services must also pay "a penny per stream" for the streams made by people on a free trial. And also student rate and family rate where they must still pay the "penny per stream" but collect less in revenue per subscriber.
It seems that the only way streaming services can pay the artist (label) "a penny a stream" and still keep about 50% of their revenue, is that there are an awful lot of paying subscribers that stream way less than an average of 17 songs a day. And I imagine these are the subscribers that are most likely to stop paying for streaming music but these are the subscribers that streaming services depends the most on, in order to be profitable.
It's such a shame that apple could not have done with TV/movies what they did with music.
That is, access to almost ALL content at a reasonable price for users and fair payment to creators, with Apple doing a tad better than break even on the service, viewing it mostly as a means of attaching folks to the ecosystem. That would be so much better than all of these separate services.
When Apple Music launched I thought they would create an Apple Records for artists. This would have worked if they can pay the artists more on their platform.
I thought this would happen because Jimmy and Dre were employed. They are known for creating big artists and huge labels.
1. Apple Records is the Beatles' label, created back in the 60s. They're not giving that up, which was made clear in litigation that had to be hammered out back when Apple computers first started entering the music arena and therefore potentially treading on the Beatles' trademark.
Apple own all of the trademarks to the name Apple and license them back to Apple Corps. If Apple wanted to set up a record label they'd be fine to do so.
But if I recall, Apple, Inc. as part of the agreement to acquire the "Apple" trademarks, provided Apple Corp. a lifetime, non transferable license, for the use of the "Apple Records" trademark. That trademark will be relinquished to Apple, Inc., once Apple Corp. sells Apple Records or Apple Corp. cease to exist.
For sure, Apple Inc. can start a record label, but they can't call it "Apple Records". Even though they own that trademark.
It's such a shame that apple could not have done with TV/movies what they did with music.
That is, access to almost ALL content at a reasonable price for users and fair payment to creators, with Apple doing a tad better than break even on the service, viewing it mostly as a means of attaching folks to the ecosystem. That would be so much better than all of these separate services.
When Apple Music launched I thought they would create an Apple Records for artists. This would have worked if they can pay the artists more on their platform.
I thought this would happen because Jimmy and Dre were employed. They are known for creating big artists and huge labels.
1. Apple Records is the Beatles' label, created back in the 60s. They're not giving that up, which was made clear in litigation that had to be hammered out back when Apple computers first started entering the music arena and therefore potentially treading on the Beatles' trademark.
Apple own all of the trademarks to the name Apple and license them back to Apple Corps. If Apple wanted to set up a record label they'd be fine to do so.
But if I recall, Apple, Inc. as part of the agreement to acquire the "Apple" trademarks, provided Apple Corp. a lifetime, non transferable license, for the use of the "Apple Records" trademark. That trademark will be relinquished to Apple, Inc., once Apple Corp. sells Apple Records or Apple Corp. cease to exist.
For sure, Apple Inc. can start a record label, but they can't call it "Apple Records". Even though they own that trademark.
They're renegotiate, or they'd call it something different. The name is not a significant barrier.
It's such a shame that apple could not have done with TV/movies what they did with music.
That is, access to almost ALL content at a reasonable price for users and fair payment to creators, with Apple doing a tad better than break even on the service, viewing it mostly as a means of attaching folks to the ecosystem. That would be so much better than all of these separate services.
When Apple Music launched I thought they would create an Apple Records for artists. This would have worked if they can pay the artists more on their platform.
I thought this would happen because Jimmy and Dre were employed. They are known for creating big artists and huge labels.
1. Apple Records is the Beatles' label, created back in the 60s. They're not giving that up, which was made clear in litigation that had to be hammered out back when Apple computers first started entering the music arena and therefore potentially treading on the Beatles' trademark.
Apple own all of the trademarks to the name Apple and license them back to Apple Corps. If Apple wanted to set up a record label they'd be fine to do so.
As their agreement is that Apple Inc. would pay a crap load of money to take ownership and then exclusively license the logo back to the Beatles’ Apple Corps, it’s fairly certain that the agreement wasn’t written such that Apple Inc. could just renege on the agreement and change the terms at will. So no, they’re not going to create a new Apple Inc. Apple Records label, and they couldn’t do so without an ugly, undesirable fight.
Comments
Yeah. I don't use Apple Music for that reason. I do use iTunes Match however. That way I don't have to fill up my phone or laptop with 15K songs, a lot of which are not commercially available.
Apple’s music library management has been pretty crappy for years.
Using just simple math and just the "penny per stream plus about 50% of revenue goes to the artist (label), that comes to an average of 500 streams per month per subscriber.
If an average of 50% ($5.00) of the $10.00 a month subscription revenue goes to the artist (label), at $.01 per stream, that comes to an average of 500 streams per month per subscriber. Or 17 steams a day. Or about an average of 1 hour of streaming a day. (unless one is streaming classical)
https://www.music-jobs.com/uk/article/news/news-pop-songs-are-getting-shorter-a-new-study-finds
Then one has to throw into the calculation that the streaming services must also pay "a penny per stream" for the streams made by people on a free trial. And also student rate and family rate where they must still pay the "penny per stream" but collect less in revenue per subscriber.
It seems that the only way streaming services can pay the artist (label) "a penny a stream" and still keep about 50% of their revenue, is that there are an awful lot of paying subscribers that stream way less than an average of 17 songs a day. And I imagine these are the subscribers that are most likely to stop paying for streaming music but these are the subscribers that streaming services depends the most on, in order to be profitable.
For sure, Apple Inc. can start a record label, but they can't call it "Apple Records". Even though they own that trademark.