arlomedia

DAalseth said:

Music copyright is a mess. You wright it, he records it, they put out the record, someone else converts it to a download or a stream. Everyone is entitled to a cut right down to the backup horn player that played one note. Unless of course someone along the way signed away their rights or bought the rights from someone else, or inherited the rights from their long lost uncle Friggy who arranged the piece. Add a few mergers and acquisitions, and copyright expirations, and it's damn near impossible to know who owns what. 

There are a few different aspects of a recording that entitles someone to royalties -- basically writing and recording -- but not arranging, playing on the track or converting between formats. Those people could possibly have negotiated a deal to share royalties with the copyright owners, but there's no law requiring that and it would be more common to pay a one-time fee for those services. Mergers and expiration dates can make it complicated, but probably not the "everyone gets a piece of the pie" scenario you described.

I have a fraction of Snapchat's user base, but I had a similar experience with one of my apps a couple years ago. I rolled out a major update (numbered as version 4.0) along with detailed release notes, announcements, video demos, etc. but the main response from users was "give me the old version back." That's not a productive request because a major app redesign is likely a part of a significant back-end upgrade and/or a significant strategic shift. It might look to a user like something that was updated in a few minutes could be rolled back in a few minutes, but the developer has months or years of work and planning invested and they're not going to simply delete that. It's better to do as Snapchat is doing and keep improving on the new design.

I've always advised my users to turn off app auto-updating, then read the release notes before installing updates. I got lots of emails from users saying, "Why did you update my app without my permission," but it really is up to users to manage their updates. Apple stands in opposition to this advice by pushing app auto-updates (IIRC, an iOS update some time before this release had turned that on for everyone by default) and nagging people endlessly about OS updates. This policy comes from Apple's reality-distorted world where every software update is completely and obviously superior to the one that preceded it.

Anyway, eventually most of my users came around and admitted that the updates were worth it and the app is now better for it.