Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Apple Paying 0.2 Cents for Each Song Streamed Free During Apple Music Trial Period

metsjetsfan said:
So is apple music on macs too? Could spotify write a script to stream billions of songs every day to try and crush apple. Altho app,e has way too much cash even if they did.
Click to expand...
Yes, they could. And the people responsible could also go to jail and Spotify could go out of business if they did this.
 
east85 said:
Apple may understand that WiFi exists.
Click to expand...
Some of us still pay data overages and have data caps on our wifi too. Between cutting the cord and using Netflix for mostly everything, it all adds up. Very unfortunate because I would indulge in this Beats 1 thing but it's just not realistic. I'll stick with playing my albums when I want without worrying about data overages, thank you.
 
pragmatous said:
Does Apple understand yet that we have data caps of 2GB for most people and that streaming isn't really an option?
Click to expand...

Not directed at you, but as a general statement to everyone, you can download streams of music to play off-line so you don't rack up any cellular data charges. And as another side-note, I sure am glad I've kept my AT&T Unlimited Data plan all these years. It will really start coming in handy, especially now that AT&T took a beatdown from the FCC and they have made their throttling practices totally realistic.
 
The .02 cents a song is not bad. As far as I can remember, most contracts payed .10 cents an album, unless you had really good managers, maybe they would push it to .20..
Money is not on the albums or streams, its in the concerts..
 
metsjetsfan said:
.2 cents is what labels get. What do artists get... Prob close to nothing
Click to expand...

Yep... welcome to the music biz.

The labels make most of the money no matter what the medium... radio, album sales, streaming, etc.

When CDs cost $16... the artist would only get a tiny fraction of that.

It makes me wonder why anyone would sign a record contract... but it happens every day.
 
3 months=129600 minutes... so assuming each song is 4 minutes...that's $8003 that Apple will be paying out of its pocket if you stream non stop:)
 
  • Like
Reactions: Benjamin Frost
labels sux.. :p

They are getting good in this, but eliminate the middle man and pay the artists what they deserve. Although any payment is better than nothing even in mass.
 
Tech198 said:
labels sux.. :p

They are getting good in this, but eliminate the middle man and pay the artists what they deserve. Although any payment is better than nothing even in mass.
Click to expand...

Labels (ideally) can take care of a lot of things that bands don't necessarily have the time, knowledge and efficiency for.
 
Benjamin Frost said:
Precisely.

The truth is, a subscription is bad value for almost everyone, be it for music, wine, golf, whatever. It's the same with most types of insurance and warranties.

As to Apple Music: it is bad value for both musicians and listeners. A musician needs to sell his piece just once to a listener to receive $1 via the iTunes Store, but he has to sell it 404 times to receive $1 on Apple Music. Those few musicians who are very popular will do well, but most will make very little, and will probably make much less money overall due to people not buying their music. Less good music will get written and music will continue its death throes.

As to the Play count argument: I don't think I’ll listen to any pieces more than a few dozen times. But it's still much cheaper buying music than spending $10 every month. And who is to say how much subscription prices will have to go up? You have no control over your music if you rent it. Music can disappear from the catalogue on a whim with no warning. What if Apple decides to stop the service, like Ping? If you subscribe, you're effectively betting that the service will continue for the rest of your life without fail.

When you're 90, will you still be wanting to pay $50 a month (or whatever it costs then), when you stick to your old favourites and haven't listened to anything new in years?
Click to expand...

I used to spend hundreds of dollars a month on music. All that gets you is a tiny fraction of music.

In fact not using a streaming service is going to not make sense for 99.99% of people. Even those who brag about their 60 gig local music library like that is a lot.

If I could have payed a monthly streaming fee for music for the last twenty years I would have saved tens of thousands of dollars and had access to much more music.

As for the artists streaming allows for more artists to at least make something. People are much more likely to give an unknown song a chance if they are just investing time and part of a prepaid subscription.

Let's see what happens when apple music is the largest streaming service in the world come October. It's likely the total amount of revenue for artists will at least double and potentially much more.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Bryan Bowler
winston1236 said:
Thats your first mistake, they will be lucky if even a quarter of all iPhone users out there use this service.
Click to expand...

So 24 billion dollars a year in revenue with 15 billion going to music industry?

I think that would change the music business forever.
 
vkd said:
Only yesterday I commented on another site about how Apple should be forced to reveal how much they are paying artists during the trial period - they must be listening!

Only yesterday, too, I was reading about artists getting supporters to loop 30 second soundbites of their songs on Spotify to earn money for them, and that they were receiving 0.5 cents / 30 seconds airtime. So, for an average of 3 minute song, they would earn - at that rate - 3 cents per song.

Isn't 0.2 cents absolutely MEAN? Billions in the bank, billions due to come in from the project, and that's all you get?
Click to expand...
Spotify has no tier that pays that rate. Their ad based service pays .14 cent per play and their subscription service is around .7 cent per play.

Apple is paying more to artists for a FREE, limited trial than Spotify pays for their everlasting ad tier.

The average earned per stream by artists when apple gets past first 90 days will be significantly higher than Spotify. I suspect the average artist royalty will end up being 100% higher per play on Apple music than on Spotify.
 
Manzzle said:
At less than a penny for each stream you might as well just not pay them for the three months. I feel bad for those artist who aren't well known. Maybe they'll make $15.00 for the whole three months.
Click to expand...
Artists not well known make $15.00 in a year.
 
Arndroid said:
Spotify has no tier that pays that rate. Their ad based service pays .14 cent per play and their subscription service is around .7 cent per play.

Apple is paying more to artists for a FREE, limited trial than Spotify pays for their everlasting ad tier.

The average earned per stream by artists when apple gets past first 90 days will be significantly higher than Spotify. I suspect the average artist royalty will end up being 100% higher per play on Apple music than on Spotify.
Click to expand...
First: There is no fixed fee that Spotify pays out.
Second: You do not know how much apple will pay after 3 months. Nobody knows, not even apple.

Stream fee is based on amount of stream / subscribers so it changes month-to-month.
 
Michael Scrip said:
Yep... welcome to the music biz.

The labels make most of the money no matter what the medium... radio, album sales, streaming, etc.

When CDs cost $16... the artist would only get a tiny fraction of that.

It makes me wonder why anyone would sign a record contract... but it happens every day.
Click to expand...

exactly so taylor swifts grandstanding will barely get the artists lunch money after all this. all dumb press. pharrel got what 10k only for 100MM streams. and hes like the top 1% of 1% of artists.
 
Abazigal said:
The musician likely won't be able to get away with it for long. I am sure there are algorithms out there looking for suspicious play habits (like a single device streaming 24/7, or the same song repeatedly?). If at the end of the week, one song or album or artiste is reporting earnings way higher than average, that is possibly grounds for the removal of the song, investigation or similar punitive action.
Click to expand...

But how can playing a song constantly be suspicious? Surely, that's the whole point of streaming—you have music on tap. How is having the radio on all day any different? Apple have made their bed and they must lie in it.

Is there a clause in Apple Music's terms that gives an upper limit to how many times you can play a song in a day?

One sometimes reads in the paper about people who play one song endlessly for days, to the consternation of their neighbours.
 
Benjamin Frost said:
But how can playing a song constantly be suspicious? Surely, that's the whole point of streaming—you have music on tap. How is having the radio on all day any different? Apple have made their bed and they must lie in it.

Is there a clause in Apple Music's terms that gives an upper limit to how many times you can play a song in a day?

One sometimes reads in the paper about people who play one song endlessly for days, to the consternation of their neighbours.
Click to expand...
I would argue that we are then treading into the spirit of the rules against the letter of the law.

The intent is to compensate artistes for their songs being played under normal circumstances. Not as a free source of revenue by setting it on loop without anyone listening to it. Yes, there might be someone out there who can stand to listen to the same song all day long, but this is also different from another person who plays spotify in his browser, loops it via a script, mutes the PC and goes to sleep. The intent here is totally different, even if the usage habits are identical.

I am just giving an example. I have no idea what sort of preventive countermeasures spotify or Apple makes, but I can only presume that they are aware of this issue. Maybe it isn't costing them too much of a problem to be worth policing actively yet, but it wouldn't surprise me if they have their ways of finding out.
 
MentalFloss said:
Your whole argument is based on the assumption that if someone listens to a piece of music, they will want to listen to it again. And again. And again. That is an absolutely incorrect assumption. I do have a music library of songs that I listen to every now and then and which I want to "own" until the day I die. But there's a lot of music which I would like to listen to, but that I will not buy, because I know that I will not listen more than once or twice.

Example: Yesterday, I checked out the "Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles of 1986". I would really like to listen to these songs over the course of two or three evenings. I own four of the songs on this list. So to listen to the whole list, I'd have to spend over a hundred Euros (I think most of these songs are €1.29). I don't know when I will feel the urge to listen to Regina's "Baby Love" or Baltimora's "Tarzan Boy" again. Chances are: Never. Or perhaps one more time in another 30 years from now. If I wanted to own any of the songs on that list, I'd own them already. So please explain to me how a €9.99 streaming service is a bad value compared to spending >$100 on owning the music. And we're talking just about three evenings. If I listen to five or six similar playlists a month, then it's still a cost of €9.99 for streaming vs. >$500 for owning the music.

Other example: After I watched the "Green Lantern" movie, I thought that James Newton Howard's soundtrack is quite nice. Cost on iTunes: €10.99. Cost as CD on Amazon: €14. Cost with Apple Music: Included in the €9.99 monthly fee. How often would I listen to it? Well... perhaps five times, max. In fact, I'd listen to most cues just once and then the two or three best ones up to five times. So why would I want to buy it? I own a lot of soundtrack albums that I listened to those five times. What an effing waste of money.

Next example: I want to play Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf" to my daughter. I loved it as a child, so I want to see what she thinks. I can buy it for €9.99 on iTunes and if my daughter doesn't like it, it will be listened to exactly once. Or I can play it through Apple Music for €9.99.

Streaming is a bad value only for music that you love and that you want to have for the rest of your life. If you don't listen to any other music beyond that, then streaming is not for you. But if you also like to listen to "incidental" pieces of music, if there is stuff that you like but that you don't love, then streaming is perfect. And most people are like that: They have a core library of the stuff they really enjoy and on top of that a wide variety of "ok" songs, and it would cost huge amounts of money to buy them all. In fact, I am quite attached to my core library. I don't listen to radio. Ever. And still streaming is a good value to me. And most people have a far more varied and less "concentrated" taste for music than me.

Hey, I want to listen to K-Pop this evening. I'm in the mood for it. I don't own any K-Pop. So now I can buy a bunch of songs from iTunes that I will most likely never listen to again. Or I can stream the current Korean top 20.

There is this strange paranoia about the music being "lost" if the service over closes. "Oh no, Apple Music is gone, so all my music is gone as well!" It never was my music. I never wanted it to be. And it's not lost. If I really wanted to, I could still buy it. If a radio channel gets closed down, I also don't cry about "my" music that I lost, and Apple Music is nothing else than a radio channel with the added benefit that I can put together my own playlist as opposed to some DJ doing it for me.
Click to expand...


Well put!

You almost make me want to subscribe. I'm still not sure that many people will want to pay for what is essentially glorified radio.
 
MentalFloss said:
Well, if you feel streaming isn't paying the artists enough, then you are free to buy the music. The artists earn more from that.

Or you can join a more expensive streaming service that pays out more to the artists. But as you can see from various comments in recent threads, many people think that $9.99 is already too much, which is why such streaming services don't exist yet. In fact, many people even join ad-supported services, because they don't want to pay a single Cent for music.

Yes, Apple might earn a lot (it remains to be seen), and the labels might earn as well. But ultimately, it's the users who have it in their hands whether the artists are paid fairly or not. Artists earned quite a bit better in pre-Internet times. Now a lot of people don't want them to have any money whatsoever. Isn't that absolutely mean?
Click to expand...

I think the price of albums on iTunes is too high.

Here in the UK, they are usually about £8. I think if they were generally £5, sales would rise a lot, leading to greater profit all round. The same with films.

It would also encourage people to buy an album more often, rather than individual tracks. I often just buy a few tracks because it's cheaper, but if the album only costs slightly more, I’ll be more tempted to buy it. I think the usual £1 for a track is fine.
 
Arndroid said:
I used to spend hundreds of dollars a month on music. All that gets you is a tiny fraction of music.

In fact not using a streaming service is going to not make sense for 99.99% of people. Even those who brag about their 60 gig local music library like that is a lot.

If I could have payed a monthly streaming fee for music for the last twenty years I would have saved tens of thousands of dollars and had access to much more music.

As for the artists streaming allows for more artists to at least make something. People are much more likely to give an unknown song a chance if they are just investing time and part of a prepaid subscription.

Let's see what happens when apple music is the largest streaming service in the world come October. It's likely the total amount of revenue for artists will at least double and potentially much more.
Click to expand...

You're not like most people.

Yes, if you spend hundreds of dollars a month on music, Apple Music will look attractive. But the average spend on music per person is about $3 per year.
 
Abazigal said:
I would argue that we are then treading into the spirit of the rules against the letter of the law.

The intent is to compensate artistes for their songs being played under normal circumstances. Not as a free source of revenue by setting it on loop without anyone listening to it. Yes, there might be someone out there who can stand to listen to the same song all day long, but this is also different from another person who plays spotify in his browser, loops it via a script, mutes the PC and goes to sleep. The intent here is totally different, even if the usage habits are identical.

I am just giving an example. I have no idea what sort of preventive countermeasures spotify or Apple makes, but I can only presume that they are aware of this issue. Maybe it isn't costing them too much of a problem to be worth policing actively yet, but it wouldn't surprise me if they have their ways of finding out.
Click to expand...

You still don't address the fundamental point: Apple are offering an all you can eat streaming service. I can certainly imagine someone wanting to put one album onto endless repeat for hours. How do you decide if that is 'in the spirit of the law'?

Perhaps this is why Spotify offers such a low rate: in order to allow for those who game the system, because they are powerless to impose restraints on streaming.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back