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Apple Music to Pay Artists Up to 10% More Royalties for Spatial Audio Content

Lord of the Pies said:
Although I use Apple Music, Apple devices across the board and AirPods Pro 2 & Max, I have Atmos disabled on everything. It seems to take the 'oomph' out of so many tracks, especially bass-heavy stuff. I found plenty of examples where a song sounded weak and in desperate need of more volume (at max), but with Atmos off, had sufficient volume and the bass thumped like thunder. Especially on AirPods Pro 2.

Dunno why, but for me, Atmos takes the life out of so much of my music.
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I agree. Faux atmos on stereo speakers/headphones just sounds weird. It doesn't work at all. Some people seem to love it - some people maybe get the pyscho acoustic effect more than me (for me it's non existant really. it just sounds like weird wide stereo)

However on an actual Dolby Atmos speaker set it sounds amazing (on some tracks of course, they've still got to do it properly) the sub doing the kick properly stuff floating around and behind you, it's amazing. I've heard of the best versions of my favourite records that way - but they sound horrible in headphones.
 
oldwatery said:
The basic problem is that Apple squeeze the life out of Spatial with their OTT compression. Listen to real lossless Spatial ands it’s pretty cool. But Apple could care less about quality in music. Never have…never will.
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The vast majority of people are hard pressed to be able to hear the difference, and therefore Apples compression is good enough for most.
 
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MauiPa said:
Streaming sure beats the old radio days, where all stations were forced to play the same few songs over and over and over again.
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I would like to add that radio plays generate royalties for writers, not performers. Streaming generates royalties for both.
 
Sheepish-Lord said:
All artists will do is run their album through some digital process to meet the spatial audio requirement. To the user, it will be a worse experience and further cements the gimmick spatial audio is unless mastered appropriately.
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Couldn't have said it better.
I noticed that stuff released from 2022 sounds pretty good in atmos, even a little better than stereo.
Anything released before, except for some monumental efforts like the 50th of Dark Side of the Moon, sounds pretty bad.

I wish there was a system to quicky toggle the modes, but if I have to stick to a system, I'd rather choose stereo as it sounds more consistent.

The only good thing I can see coming out of this is more artist, and more traffic, going to apple music.
As an apple music user myself I'm tired of everyone I know using solely spotify...

What use do collaborative playlists have if everyone you know is on spotify?!
This has always been a thing I didn't like...being pretty much alone in my fruition of the service.
I'm always a little annoyed when people share playlists, but you need spotify to listen to them.
 
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Many musical artists will do the math's and realize it will be not cost effective for them to convert their songs to spatial audio. Basically what they will do is look at what the download stats are for their songs, then work out how much it is going to cost in time and resources converting to spatial audio and then see how many times their songs would have to be downloaded for the whole converting process to be worthwhile. I doubt many musical artists will be looking at the 10% as an incentive to convert.
 
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wanha said:
You seem to have a low opinion of artists as greedy swindlers.

And while some certainly are just that, many artists are actually very passionate about how their music sounds.

In the end, if the artist you listen to cares more about money than about sound quality, you are likely to get an inferior product.
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Did you forget about the labels that sit between artists and streaming services who are probably already calculating which back catalog songs are worth doing the bare minimum cost and effort to take advantage of this extra 10%? Because they’re the ones this is actually targeted at, not the artists themselves.
 
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Spatial audio and its ilk may work for things like pop music and movie soundtracks, but it's nothing more than a distracting gimmick for classical (see The New Yorker's classical music critic Alex Ross for the takedown).

But Apple doesn't give a sh*t about that and is pushing classical artists to use it, recorded quality be damned, and now docks/punishes them if they don't. How long before Cupertino starts giving spatial audio recordings preference in search results in Apple Music/Apple Classical? Maybe Apple should consider rebranding it as Spastic Audio?
 
Every single spatial audio thing I've listened to sounds dramatically worse than the normal version, just straight up garbage tier quality as if they only produce them at very low bitrates per channel or something. But, even if that wasn't the case, the production is so random. Just like old school mono recordings being rereleased in stereo with phase adjusted stereo "effect". It's always a cheeseball afterthought done in post and this is only going to make that even more solidly the case. Nobody's going to adjust their audio production practices just so Apple can sell a feature most people don't care about at all.
 
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boak said:
Fan-centric means each subscriber’s monthly fee is divided up to pay each of the artist they listen to in a month, could be based on number tracks, time spent listening etc. This compensation model has been shown to pay emerging artists more.
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It’s complete nonsense that this isn’t already the norm.

With the current model, all the money earned through subscription fees is split between all artists that have been played and are compensated per play.

But the ones that you listen to aren’t necessarily paid the most of your subscription fee even if they are what you listen to the most.

This means that you, the Music or Spotify subscriber, are always paying artists like Drake and Taylor Swift the largest amount simply because they are the artists that get the most plays in total.

If I only play one song, one time for an entire month, and don’t use Music for the rest of the month, then all $10 should go to the artist that owns that one song.
 
They should pay listeners to listen in Spatial Audio. On most songs, the main difference is that the mix sounds terrible when Spatial Audio is activated. On AirPods Max and Pro, it doesn't sound immersive at all, it just sounds bad. For example, Prince's When Doves Cry is a real mess and sounds nothing like the original.
 
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Glad to see technology providing new revenue streams to artists.

Speaking of which, I'd love to see Apple provide a store through Garageband or Logic to sell stems. Isolated tracks would be huge.
 
ApplesAreSweet&Sour said:
It’s complete nonsense that this isn’t already the norm.

With the current model, all the money earned through subscription fees is split between all artists that have been played and are compensated per play.

But the ones that you listen to aren’t necessarily paid the most of your subscription fee even if they are what you listen to the most.

This means that you, the Music or Spotify subscriber, are always paying artists like Drake and Taylor Swift the largest amount simply because they are the artists that get the most plays in total.

If I only play one song, one time for an entire month, and don’t use Music for the rest of the month, then all $10 should go to the artist that owns that one song.
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The issue I see with that model is you've cpped what an artist can receive, regardless of their overall percentage of streams. For example, if you stream an artists songs as you describe, or nonstop for a month, all they get is $10; even if your non-stop streaming would net them a higher payment on a per stream basis.
 
I just can't get into spatial audio. It just sounds like the stereo field has been pushed beyond a natural level and makes everything sound worse, unless it's truly been optimized for it. I haven't found a single song that is so far.
 
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truthsteve said:
or you could read the article
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I did and if you don’t think there’s an automated process to meet Apple’s standards for spatial audio then you’re wishful thinking. Spatial audio is not Atmos so I highly doubt the standards are high.
 
wanha said:
You seem to have a low opinion of artists as greedy swindlers.

And while some certainly are just that, many artists are actually very passionate about how their music sounds.

In the end, if the artist you listen to cares more about money than about sound quality, you are likely to get an inferior product.
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Never said that at all ha. The majority of music is recorded in stereo and if you’re doing Dolby then an engineer remasters it often times worse than the original. Spatial audio is gimmicky and not really for the music industry IMO.
 
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Sheepish-Lord said:
I did and if you don’t think there’s an automated process to meet Apple’s standards for spatial audio then you’re wishful thinking. Spatial audio is not Atmos so I highly doubt the standards are high.
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the scale of music isn't nearly as much as the scale of the App Store and Apple has at least a human step in every app review (along with automation).

they can do human review for every song.
 
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Though I don't use Spatial audio always, it is always nice to have more content. This move should hopefully help in adding more content.
 
ttyRazor said:
Did you forget about the labels that sit between artists and streaming services who are probably already calculating which back catalog songs are worth doing the bare minimum cost and effort to take advantage of this extra 10%? Because they’re the ones this is actually targeted at, not the artists themselves.
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I did not forget, but I see the industry moving more towards self-publishing where artists record, produce, and upload their own music.

The tools are in place for this and it allows control of the quality of music.

But you are right, those artists whose music is controlled by record labels and who don't care enough to fight it will end up with an inferior product.

Luckily, no one needs to listen to the Spatial Audio version if they don't want to as it's just an additional option.

Also, Apple makes it quite clear in their statement that they will not accept substandard Spatial Audio mixes, but obviously who knows where exactly that line will be drawn.
 
AlinomyTomy said:
You seem to think this would only apply to artists who would understand or have the ultimate control to do this properly to unlock the new compensation rate

Some jazz labels massacred great records from the 1950s and 60s with terrible, noise war remasters in the early 2000s into what are now in some cases still the primary editions of those records. It's not the fault of the artists who were in most cases dead or in nursing homes when their music was being made worse to satisfy some executive's scheme for a quick buck
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You are right, many artists don't understand or care about this.

But how fortunate for all of us that Spatial Audio is an option you can choose to listen to or not.
 
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