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Apple and Sony 'iRadio' Negotiations Stalling Over Skipped Songs
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Spotify isn't like Pandora. You can browse whatever album/artists you want + radio. Which you can skip.
Listening time for free varies between regions, in Asia and the US, it's unlimited listening with ads thrown in between some trakcs.
You way overestimate how many customers spotify has.
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Spotify costs significantly more than pandora.
I had a few days on the All Access and it is not a radio for sure. It's neat, you can search for anything, even foreign songs, play them and if you like a song, you can create a radio station that will play similar songs. You can look at the list and delete songs you don't want to listen to. All your radio stations are available to look at and resume. So far, I really like what I see.
I don't need another pandora
In the current iTunes Store, I can play a few seconds of a song and then jump forward to a few seconds of the next song, all day long!
So with iRadio, the plan is to force me to listen to entire songs for free, and not allow me to just play short clips, where is the logic in that?
I think i'll stick with rdio...
In the current iTunes Store, I can play a few seconds of a song and then jump forward to a few seconds of the next song, all day long!
So with iRadio, the plan is to force me to listen to entire songs for free, and not allow me to just play short clips, where is the logic in that?
I think i'll stick with rdio...
As of last year, Spotify had 20 million users subscribing to the free account, and 6 million paying. Things have only gotten better for them since.
If Apple's music service is another internet radio attempt, they might eventually overtake Pandora, but they'll barely put a dent into Spotify.
Spotify has six million paying customers and is losing money. In its second month apples iRadio will likely be paying more royalties to music companies than spotify's entire revenue
There is no evidence right now Apple plans for a pay service (the pay market so far is relatively small and unprofitable). Apple wants an improved radio service it can provide to its hundred million iOS users for free. Part of thst strategy is not canibalizing iTunes but instead integrating it into the system.
Spotify is being boxed in. Apple on the free side will leak some of their customers and Google is essentially offering the same pay service. Yet spotify is not making money now and their growth potential has been stripped away. Google and Apple will soon control this space and spotify will struggle to exist. It is not like spotify has some special features google can not also provide.
In fact ultimately google and apple will be able to integrate your own cloud stored music into your radio channels as well, which is something spotify will not be able to match.
Imagine when my iRadio is playing and it picks a song that is part of my iTunes Match it will not even have to have a royalty paid and can be rewound or relustened or skipped a million times.
Google is going after spotify and Apple pandora. They will both likely succeed in marginalizing their targets in the next two to three years. IRadio will be prominently accessible on every iOS device.
Apples drawn out negotiations alone demonstrate apple us looking to do more than any of the current providers. Apple could have gotten spotify's terms for streaming , charged ten dollars a month and lost money too. They could have easily got pandoras terms and lost money with radio. Clearly their plannl is more involved and I also suspect it does not include losing money like all the current players.
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Lol even adobe doesn't want flash any more. Let it go.
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Given none of them make money, playing hardball is the only way to go.
I'm not sure that Apple is being terribly realistic. When the sky was the limit, Apple could demand anything. But now, the limits to Apple's growth and future impact seem to be on everybody's mind.
Because apple is interested in providing an IMPROVED music discovery model (meaning better than pandora) which dovetails in nicely with their position as the largest music retailer in the world.
It is pretty clear what they are going for and why. Those of you who love paying for spotify will still be able to do so, although prices will likely increase because they lose money now, google is attacking them head on and apple and google will , together shrink their potential growth market to nothing
Nowhere has it ever been said apple was going after spotify's pay for streaming model. They are creating song discovery radio. I would not even be surprised if the ocassiinally offered iTunes discounts on songs you discovered via their radio service.
Because it will not have a subscription cost and because it will hit most iOS devices it will quickly become the largest royalty payer to the music industry for any if these services almost immediately. Even if apple did not get everything they wanted now, they will the next time around. Especially when they can demonstrate radio plays leading to iTunes sales.
So the six to ten million people who use spotify and pandora will enjoy themselves (although i suspect apple canabalizes twenty percent of them) Apple will have a nice base if sixty, eighty or even a hundred million users for iRadio. Even for fractions of pennies per song played it will end up being a sugnifucantly large new stream of revenue much needed by the record companies. If they also share in the advertising and see increased iTunes sales it could mean trouble when the spotify's and pandoras have to renew their deals down the road.
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Yeah he mentioned Samsung by name. Where are they innovating in home electronics.
I wouldn't be so sure. With the largest music catalogue for sale and the largest (by far) presence in "MP3" players, and as a result the largest Boom-box, portable stereo and home stereo interface system on the planet, Apple may be a force to be reckoned with. And Apple of course even has penetration in the PC market place undercutting Microsoft's failed Zune efforts. It may prove to ultimately be about the infrastructure and Eco system - Apple is the easy leader there. And they clearly have been working long and hard to get it right, as evidenced by this very article. I assure you, Spotify and Pandora are both worried about the dent Apple intends to make.
My belief, from the beginning is all the record companies out limits on skipping or charged them as full songs because the licensing fee to play a song in a radio format is significantly less than the fee charged in an on demand or user selected circumstance.
If people could skip as much as they wanted for free thus would allow people to create a quasi on demand system while only paying for the radio streaming license fees. I like one song and then skip skip skip until I find another song I like.
The record labels felt this would be a way to semi circumvent the difference between in demand streaming and radio streaming. And again, since the price difference is significant they have always been hard asses about skipping songs.
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Pandora and spotify both have relatively small user bases. Especially compared to the installed base of iOS devices.
I don't know if anyone gets wiped off the map but even if iRadio is just a slightly improved version of pandora it will become the largest service almost immediately.
I can only speculate on iTunes and iTunes Match integration and other features. Their ability to quickly release to a large installed userbase makes it pretty certain.
Personally I believe apple will only release a free/ad supported product initially. I could be totally wrong with that. If they offered both I think spotify investors wound become very nervous.
I really think one of their primary goals of the service is new music discovery with the hopes that drives iTunes sales. That is why I do not think we will see a paid streaming service ala spotify.
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Pandora and spotify both have relatively small user bases. Especially compared to the installed base of iOS devices.
I don't know if anyone gets wiped off the map but even if iRadio is just a slightly improved version of pandora it will become the largest service almost immediately.
I can only speculate on iTunes and iTunes Match integration and other features. Their ability to quickly release to a large installed userbase makes it pretty certain.
Personally I believe apple will only release a free/ad supported product initially. I could be totally wrong with that. If they offered both I think spotify investors wound become very nervous.
I really think one of their primary goals of the service is new music discovery with the hopes that drives iTunes sales. That is why I do not think we will see a paid streaming service ala spotify.
The music is an ad... with a link to buy the track.
Why publishers don't understand that I don't know...
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The only Apple Radio I want to listen to will have Siri dropping in from time-to-time giving me local traffic and weather, cracking jokes in the morning and doing on-location promotions at furniture stores and car dealerships.
It's Siiiiiirrriiii and the butt! On the radio! iiiiiiiiiiiRRRRADIO!
Me too. I'd rather buy some music i like than pay for streaming it. I always said that nothings can beat having it on your device ready to play whenever you want how many times you want and so on.
Yesterday i purchased Get Lucky by Daft Punk. I heard it playing in the gym and now i have it on my iPhone ready to play when i want and without recurring fees or someone telling how many times i can skip songs that i don't like.
or just remove whole sony content, and then apple will get in line quickly. remember this works both ways.
and why sony wants money? because they own the content apple wants. thats simple
The irony in your first sentence. Apple doesn't want complete control does it?
The Minidisc was actually a damn good idea and they were very good. Much better than any Personal CD player, better battery life, you could record your own discs straight from the stereo.
They should have released it 5 years earlier though.
As for the Walkman, that lived 10 years longer than it should have.
Spotify boasts more functionality than Pandora, it's more in league with MOG than Pandora as it allows you to browse tracks by artist, albums and create your own playlists. To some extant, it's a lot like iTunes just that you don't locally store music.
It also has a radio feature.
As a result, I believe subscribing for a premium Spotify account is a better value as opposed to buying a paid Pandora/iRadio membership.
It also has a radio feature.
As a result, I believe subscribing for a premium Spotify account is a better value as opposed to buying a paid Pandora/iRadio membership.
Apple is stupid ... iRadio is a thing no one would use, because there are better services out there which let you choose songs from a hugh collection of songs, without being limited to a pre chosen radio.
Why is Apple doing this? Oh yeah its the thinking we have iTunes Store, so lets let the people listen to the songs and then they will buy it there. Time is changing and like Steve Jobs said you have to cannibalism yourself like they did with iPad and Laptops/Computers.
If they don't make the service like spotify then they will have a hard time ...
Why is Apple doing this? Oh yeah its the thinking we have iTunes Store, so lets let the people listen to the songs and then they will buy it there. Time is changing and like Steve Jobs said you have to cannibalism yourself like they did with iPad and Laptops/Computers.
If they don't make the service like spotify then they will have a hard time ...
It's great that theres alternatives. I dont see a point in Owning music over listening to it. With spotify i can find new stuff, with cds or iTunes id just listen to same old stuff.
There's no irony--Apple's strict, but not a jerk about it to the consumer. They have a very strict walled garden, and they offer a limited range of things they'll let you do or buy on or with some of their devices, but they were the ones who mainstreamed DRM-free music sales in the iTunes store. Did the labels like that? No, but Apple managed to push it through anyway. While Sony was busy not only not doing that, but forcing people to convert songs to ATRAC format to play on digital walkmans.
Apple similarly never put surreptitious rootkits in their music, or turned their DRM scheme into the forced-firmware-upgrading, draconian mess that Sony's Blu-ray DRM is. Or done anything as violently consumer hostile as the RIAA trawling lawsuits that Sony's music arm has participated in.
Again, it's the difference between a device company that sells media and a company that has let the media guys tell the device guys what to do.
None of that is to say that Apple is a flawless company, but I've never heard of them suing any of their own users, which is a lot more than I can say for Sony, and Apple's OS updates don't give me the creeping sense of rage I get every time my PS3 tells me it needs a software update that is supposed to improve my experience but is really just tightening DRM thubmscrews or occasionally removing banner features because somebody might use them to bootleg a game.
Honestly, I can't think of any other solution that would satisfy both companies. In the end, if Sony doesn't sign on, only the end user suffers.
The solution with not paying a song which only was heard a few seconds before skipped would be a perfect one for the customer AND the company, I think.
While I don't listen to much music these days, Spotify is the best when you want to go back in time a bit.
They have a lot of international (It's a big World, not just USA) songs, country specific that nobody in the US has ever heard or can get via Apple/Google etc..
They have vinyl version libraries of songs which were never officially digitized and, and, and......
Will be interesting what Apple comes up with.
To SONY:
If a consumer skips a song after listening in, that means the consumer doesn't want to listen to that song, i.e. it is not worth anything.
Stop being dense!
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It seems likely that royalties are due whenever the song, or any portion of the song, gets played. Otherwise, what happens when a portion of a song is used during an advertisement, or in a movie, or wherever?
If that is true, then Sony owes third parties whenever somebody plays a portion of the song on streaming radio, and it is reasonable for them to require Apple to pay.