But it plays almost instantly. You mean without downloading it? I actually don't mind that. I prefer to download my running lists. The gaps suck when you are running.
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Apple Determines iTunes Match Royalties By Counting How Many Times A Song is Accessed
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But it plays almost instantly. You mean without downloading it? I actually don't mind that. I prefer to download my running lists. The gaps suck when you are running.
Turning legit
This shows that people will be willing to pay for previously pirated content if the price is right.
This reminds me of back in the day when Lotus dominated spreadsheets and Wordperfect word processing. At the time there were competitive upgrade deals that were only $250 compared to the full $600 retail price. But you had to show physical evidence (original manual cover, diskette) of ownership that got mailed back to the company.
Then Microsoft did a survey and discovered that a significant portion of people with pirated copies of Lotus or Wordperfect would be willing to pay $250 for MS Word and become legal owners. So Microsoft changed the conditions so that the software would just check that you had the software installed and then proceed with installation. No proof of purchase necessary. I worked retail at the time and Word and Excel sold like hotcakes to people 'upgrading'.
Many of those people became regular upgraders to future releases and a large source of revenue to Microsoft.
Apple's done the same with iTunesMatch. I'm more than willing to pay $25 to legitimize the digital music I acquired before my first iPod and iTunes.
This shows that people will be willing to pay for previously pirated content if the price is right.
This reminds me of back in the day when Lotus dominated spreadsheets and Wordperfect word processing. At the time there were competitive upgrade deals that were only $250 compared to the full $600 retail price. But you had to show physical evidence (original manual cover, diskette) of ownership that got mailed back to the company.
Then Microsoft did a survey and discovered that a significant portion of people with pirated copies of Lotus or Wordperfect would be willing to pay $250 for MS Word and become legal owners. So Microsoft changed the conditions so that the software would just check that you had the software installed and then proceed with installation. No proof of purchase necessary. I worked retail at the time and Word and Excel sold like hotcakes to people 'upgrading'.
Many of those people became regular upgraders to future releases and a large source of revenue to Microsoft.
Apple's done the same with iTunesMatch. I'm more than willing to pay $25 to legitimize the digital music I acquired before my first iPod and iTunes.
I'm trying out iTunes Match right now...does iTunes Genius turn on automatically when you start iTunes Match?
Because mine did and I've never used it.
Because mine did and I've never used it.
If you're wondering "what about artists who put their own stuff on loop 24/7?" the answer is probably that it only comes out of one pool of $25pa. Which the fool paid himself, haha.
My question is this: I have 1,400 songs that were NOT matched. They have no metadata that I didn't add myself. How does Apple find this super-indie artist?
I mean, you may *think* your music tastes are "indie", but mine are super-indie <adjusts tie> Most of my music collection has *never* been for sale, ever.
For that matter, what about GarageBand songs? I made 2 or 3 and put them in iTunes myself! Do I get paid? No!
CK.
My question is this: I have 1,400 songs that were NOT matched. They have no metadata that I didn't add myself. How does Apple find this super-indie artist?
I mean, you may *think* your music tastes are "indie", but mine are super-indie <adjusts tie> Most of my music collection has *never* been for sale, ever.
For that matter, what about GarageBand songs? I made 2 or 3 and put them in iTunes myself! Do I get paid? No!
CK.
I don't see how this works...If a song is uploaded it means it is not in the iTunes match library. So that artist might not have a contract with Apple in the first place so I don't see how they could be paid.
Yeah, perhaps the problem is music is too expensive. If it was cheap like itunes mach people wouldn't think twice about paying for it. It's when companies like apple are offering 60GB music players and your paying £100 for 100 tracks that people don't want to pay. £1 is a lot of a track that especially given how disposable and trend based much is. You might not like what you downloaded a few weeks ago and have wasted your money.
People want to have 1000s of tracks and not pay 1000s of pounds for them which is understandable. Charge a few pence per track for example and no one is going to worry about buying and having to forgo other things. There's a lot of money to be made with the mass availability of music and companies like apple have so far priced consumers out of the market. If diamonds were worth £1 no one would bother stealing them.
The music market needs to be more causal and accessible for buyers at a price they want to pay. People are paying almost as much as they did when companies had to produce physical products, distribute them, sell them to companies to retail them in a physical store with mark up, and not be able to use the cheap internet marketing resources available today. If they could make the music industry profitable having to do all of that they can do it again by passing on their lower costs.
Multi-Billions times by a few pence is a hell of a lot of money!
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Yes it is... and not only in the music field, every kind of digital content (entertainment/information) could benefit from this type of approach. I think even non-digital content (products/services) could benefit from this kind of approach... well, at least customers and small-scale businesses could benefit, not so sure about big multinational corporations.
I guess it's assumed that a non-label artist has already been paid for the content. I'm not sure I know the answer to this question either. It seems like the best way to keep the peace in the industry
Thanks MR for posting this. I was on the fence about match but now there is no way in hell I would sign up. The suits at the record co's and Apple can suck it. Plenty of excellent independent options out there for good musicians to get paid without the heavy hand of corporate america fleecing you.
I venture to say that the number of people who will be renewing their iTunes Match accounts after the first year will be <50%. Once most people have tried it, it will die a slow but certain within a few years. For me, the only point of getting an iTM account was to upgrade the quality of my collection. Once that is done (I have till november) it's addios iTM!.
12% for songwriters isn't the full cut the of the artists.
The songwriter is just that the persons who are credited with writing the song.
Most of the time they get paid pre-sale in most contracts.
There is the also the recording artists who play the song and they get some cut of Record percentage.
I think there is another misconception on the thread. I don't think they meant every song play counts towards the distribution. It says "access" counts but to me that means each time I re-download the song from Apple servers and not just sync it on to the device from my own other device.
Correct. The article would be more accurate if it said that "88% goes to record labels and 12% to music publishing companies". Performing artists would then be paid by their record label and Songwriters by their Publishers according to the terms of their respective contracts.
My collection is several TB of Classical music primarily sourced from vinyl, + a couple TB primarily of archival live & studio recordings not yet officially released from Zeppelin, Floyd, Radiohead, Grandaddy etc I rcvd from doing work in the biz. + about 50gig of my old cd collection poorly ripped a decade ago. I'm confused as to what would happen if I ran iTunes Match.
Would I upload all kinds of vinyl recordings so everyone else who eventually tried to match those albums from CDs would get my poppy clicky transfers? Would all the tracks I agreed not to share become public record with all my incriminating metadata in them? Would ITM replace my live tracks with studio versions it recognized?
Otherwise, much of my old cd-rips collection could benefit from an upgrade by now. Just a little nervous. Can't take any chances. Probably have to divide up separate libraries...
Would I upload all kinds of vinyl recordings so everyone else who eventually tried to match those albums from CDs would get my poppy clicky transfers? Would all the tracks I agreed not to share become public record with all my incriminating metadata in them? Would ITM replace my live tracks with studio versions it recognized?
Otherwise, much of my old cd-rips collection could benefit from an upgrade by now. Just a little nervous. Can't take any chances. Probably have to divide up separate libraries...
I've been on the fence about the whole concept but this story piqued my interest. I'm looking forward to seeing how iTunes match really works with rare/live/homemade tracks.
Like others on here...
"The remaining 70% is divided, with 88% going to record labels and 12% going to songwriters."
I leant something today. I learnt why the planet embarked on a road of ripping music and not buying it.
Are we saying that this is a representative ratio/split of revenues? No wonder bands have been pissed...
I do hope not so I can say I didn't learn something today - I've got the whole rest of the day to learn something new and don't want to not be able to learn something valuable today because of this rubbish ratio!
"The remaining 70% is divided, with 88% going to record labels and 12% going to songwriters."
I leant something today. I learnt why the planet embarked on a road of ripping music and not buying it.
Are we saying that this is a representative ratio/split of revenues? No wonder bands have been pissed...
I do hope not so I can say I didn't learn something today - I've got the whole rest of the day to learn something new and don't want to not be able to learn something valuable today because of this rubbish ratio!
To be honest, I think you, and quite a few others, would benefit from studying the music industry's practices before the Internet/digital age took off. 8.4% of retail is way, way more than most songwriters would ever have received under that model. More than double. Even artists usually didn't get that unless they were already pretty famous and could renegotiate original deals.
Love your signature!
It seems that a lot of people are not getting the way this works.
Record labels used to earn a lot of money and deserve it too, because they were the ones taking the risk. If they spent $100K on a band to record an album in the studio and the album would be a complete flop, the artist wouldn't lose anything and the record company lost a pile of cash. So back in the day it was a logical model.
Then record labels got more cautious. They never started out with recording a whole album, just a single, maybe two. Then they would record an album. The money spent on the studio was a loan now, so the record companies want that money back out of the royalties earned. So record companies no longer deserve it that much in my opinion.
The model right now is:
30% of $25 to Apple (well deserved, because otherwise the other 70% of $25 would've never existed)
88% of $17.50 to record companies
12% of $17.50 to songwriters
Mind you that songwriters have the intellectual property. If Britney Spears covers Love Me Do by the Beatles (let's pray she never will) then the money still goes to John Lennon (his family?) & Paul McCartney. Not to Britney Spears and not even to the Beatles, because John Lennon & Paul McCartney wrote the song, not the Beatles and not Britney Spears.
So every time a song is played on the radio, or someone buys an album, the artist isn't paid every time. They never have and they never will.
The artist will be paid whatever deal they struck with the record company. It can be a fixed amount, it can be a percentage of the royalties. That's really up to them.
Artist make most of their money with performing live, doing commercials or things like that.
Record companies still make a lot of money, but with all the independent labels, that will hopefully be over someday.
Songwriters make their money based on record sales, iTunes downloads, iTunes Match access, Spotify plays, etc.
That is not true. You can buy extra iCloud storage for an annual price, but iTunes Match never counts towards your storage space. It's always $25 a year.
One more thing I was wondering... What happens to the songs that are uploaded to iTunes Match, do they become property of Apple so they can be sold in the iTunes Store? Because that would be a smart (and nasty) way of expanding the iTunes Store content.
Hang on...
If it's not matched and uploaded how do Apple determine who to pay royalties to?
Also say there could determine who the artist and label are as these artist/label is not on iTunes how exactly would Apple pay them money?
If it's not matched and uploaded how do Apple determine who to pay royalties to?
Also say there could determine who the artist and label are as these artist/label is not on iTunes how exactly would Apple pay them money?
Surely there's a way to abuse this system? Upload songs by your own artists, then play them loads of times across many, many devices & accounts? You'd end up getting back a larger share of the iTunes Match "pie" than you deserve.
Let's take the analogue of downloading a piece of bread, a particular piece of bread using a bakers own recipe. You haven't stolen anything from anyone, and the bread presumable is able to feed you and your family. The net utility, in economic terms, is positive.
The same holds through for culture and information. In order to maximize the utility of these products, the price should be equal to the marginal cost. The marginal cost of a virtual copy is equivalent to zero.
The reason why copyright was introduced was primarily to ensure that these products, culture and information, was being produced. It has private economic benefits as well, but that is secondary concern, and shouldn't be the prime reason for enforcing a state-sanctioned monopoly with a threat state-sanctioned violence if breached (I'm not being cute here: NZ police commandos attacked the family home of the founder of Megaupload with helicopters and assault rifles at dawn upon request by the US monopoly holders in order to shackle a man for allegedly breaching copyright. Feel free to discuss the moral of that story).
So the private economic interests has always been a secondary concern, although recently lobbying have ensured that it seems to be the raison d'etre for copyright. It is not.
Why does he need the help of international SWAT teams to make money? We had artists before copyright as well. They were able to make money. Specifically, an artist can still sell music (yes, music is still a multi-billion industry), but would probably benefit from doing concerts and finding new business models. A business models that relies on the government attacking people's homes with helicopters and SWAT teams at dawn is probably not sustainable in the long run.