Do you believe that, because you can't somehow believe that Swift might actually just give a crap?
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Apple Reverses Course, Will Pay Artists During Apple Music Free Trial
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Do you believe that, because you can't somehow believe that Swift might actually just give a crap?
pr stunt? eh no...source?Actually they did have a choice, they could've dropped TS just like Spotify let her go. Don't pretend that she has that much control over the industry.
I still think this was all a PR stunt. Just wait in the coming days or weeks and MR will be posting this news if it's true, or a rumor.
Taylor Swift isn't about to release a new album.
So actually pretty poor work by the PR department if you think she is.
Don't tell me - you're assuming she must have a new album coming out, because you've decided in your head that this is a PR stunt.
And you have decided it is a PR stunt, because for some as of yet unknown reason, you can't comprehend the idea that Taylor Swift might genuinely feel strongly enough about this to speak out about it.
And why might that be - is it because she is a woman?
It's the lazy nature of debates these days, people will label others as fanboys/haters depending on the nature of the comment. I hate it when I see new members join and they get attacked for trolling cause they have an issue with a product and have criticised it. Or when reviewers get personally attacked cause they gave sub perfect scores , like in the case of the Apple watch, and in this case Taylor swift.
My advice, you will very quickly identify the people who are set in thier ways, and it's your choice to debate with them wasting your time, or ignore thier remarks. Be they pro apple or anti apple. The. Best ones are the ones in the middle.
I think you will find that is against forum rules, some of our worst offenders, turn these in to personal attacks and run to the mods. Straight of the top of my head I know a number of people who would have done a 180! From spending time on MR you learn about people, and thier posts become very predictive.
If I quoted examples , the individuals would run to the mods, comment removed, and I get a nice time out.
My advice , don't turn these debates personal buy using members names. A generic comment to show what happens suffices.
Assuming you are not in the UK, The Daily Mail is basically trash, which will twist, distort, and flat out lie to do its best to talk utter garbage.
With the photo thing, its not really the same at all - its simply standard industry practice. Why should photographers profit in perpetuity from the images of the celebrities they take photos of?
They may well be getting scraps, and that's probably a whole other discussion. Although in a nutshell, presumably the hope is that those scraps will get bigger due to sheer volume of paying subscribers.
But if we accept that they only get scraps, then it is bogus to argue that the trial would have cost them dearly. It wouldn't have - they just wouldn't have had three months worth of scraps. Which for many would be virtually nothing.
I agree. A lot of music that people stream, hear on the radio (or even torrent) is not something that they would buy anyway, so a lot of the time it doesn't really affect sales as much as record labels would like to believe. It just drives me nuts when people complain that $9.99 is too high for that much content. I actually really hope that streaming services will encourage people to listen to as many different bands as possible and expand their tastes! I also completely agree with Taylor that the work shouldn't be free. Content creators have a hard enough time trying to convince people not to steal or devalue their work.
Who says I believe that? All I'm saying is that there's a fair chance that this is actually how it went down. You could say I'm agnostic about whatever Taylor Swift is doing at the moment. Or that I don't really care.
Apple has been planning streaming services for a long time. The giant data centers that you reference, which Apple has built over the last few years for billions of dollars, were not intended just to push out iTunes and App store data. Apple moves a lot of data that way as well as when they push out system updates. But each of those Apps is a one off download. Their Apple TV is just a hobby and probably still has less customers than Apple Music will have by the end of the first week in July. Having a music streaming means having a customer who is sucking down a 100MB everyday. If the customer loads up your service at work and plays it all day they might call half a gigabyte I think. What does the average iTunes/App Store customer do now? Maybe download three or four songs a month and two Apps? The point is supporting streaming is massively harder than downloads.
Apple has been going green because it is good for environment and because it is cheaper than buying from the local utility. Also because Apple has been anticipating running these data centers (which have not yet been fully utilized enough to justify their existence) at much higher levels. I sometimes wonder if the infrastructure was really built to support streaming TV, which would be another order of magnitude. So in any case, while no there aren't reports that Apple is building multi-billion data centers this week in hopes they will be ready by June 30. Construction doesn't work like that. These data centers have been built over the last several years and they are massive.
As for the general inequities that artists make less than music industry executives, well Apple can't do anything about that. They have to pay the person who owns the song and that is label be it big or indie. But Apple is the only person in this equation who is spending significant amounts of money to bring Apple Music into existence. None of the music industry is specifically putting money at risk in connection with Apple Music.
I believe there are 4 big labels that own over 50% of the music we listen to. But there are also a lot of other labels that I would call big that aren't part of the big corporate four. The rap labels come to mind. And I think the record labels were mainly there as part of the distribution network. But since physical distribution is getting to be a smaller part of the process and in fact iTunes is the major distributor and i suspect Apple Music will be the next major distribution network. The major labels may lose a lot of power in the next few years.
I think Swift took a stand here against Apple because she was right and she and Big Machine suspected, correctly, that Apple would cave in. The outcry against asking all the music owners to donate their music for free for three months to every potential customer was huge. It seemed completely unfair. Especially when Apple can afford a modest payout (Apple has not said what they will pay for each stream. I suspect it will be less during the trial periods and that will strike people as a fair compromise.)
HobeSoundDarryl
macrumors G5
Put yourself in THEIR shoes (I know that's so hard to do around here). Those scraps might help them make a rent or house payment. Without those scraps, they might miss such a payment. Those who are doing this for a career are NOT hobbyists with another source of income to cover their bills while they take the hit. You guys are perceiving that they are well positioned to just do it as Apple originally intended and be fine. Apple & Labels and the Taylor Swifts could afford to do it that way and be fine. The vast majority of musical artists are paycheck to paycheck, where ever dollar counts. If you have anyone in your life who lives like that, try to imagine them being asked to potentially lose a chunk of their paycheck for 3 months and then imagine how readily they could just make that work.
I can't believe how hard it seems for many of us to get that these artists are not all Taylor Swifts. I would think there are certainly some people we personally know in our own lives who are paycheck to paycheck people barely squeaking by. Much or even most of these "artists" we want to so easily spin as "sacrifice 3 months for more reward later" are those type of people. 3 months of sacrifice might transition them from some cheap home to homeless. "So what if you'll become homeless starving musician during the trial... just think how much more you'll make AFTER the 3 months when you get your sliver of a slice of that extra 1.5% that Apple has added over and above Spotify, after the labels take their bigger bites of that sliver of a slice."
If you have the good fortune where you can easily sacrifice a chunk of your income for 3 months for a reward later, good for you. But that doesn't automatically mean that everyone is like you... especially these musical artists trying to scratch out a living down at the end of the pool opposite the handful of superstars like Swift, Perry & Bieber, etc.
If you want to argue that if it's really tiny scraps, it's bogus to think they can't take the hit, why can't it be the other way: if it's only tiny scraps why can't the richest company in the world throw these artists for which they are so regularly proclaiming their love a little bone? At the end, that company gets to start taking 28% right off the top forever. If we want to assign a bogus tag, I think it's bogus to see this only one way that favors the giant, cash-rich corporation over the unknown musician trying to squeak out his or her rent. If this was Samsung, Microsoft or Google in place of Apple, would we feel as passionate about favoring the rich business entity over these artists in otherwise identical circumstances? (rhetorical but that should resonate).
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Taylor Swift needs to take a good look at how she deals with professional photographers that cover her concerts. She is much worse that what Apple was up to.
You think Apple has obnoxious contracts, take a look at the one she requires from the poor photographer:
http://www.diyphotography.net/an-open-response-to-taylor-swifts-rant-against-apple/
You think Apple has obnoxious contracts, take a look at the one she requires from the poor photographer:
http://www.diyphotography.net/an-open-response-to-taylor-swifts-rant-against-apple/
HobeSoundDarryl
macrumors G5
All good points.
I offered up the green (solar) in response to the implication that Apple was solely having to pay an electric bill for this... as if that was some great financial burden to Apple in support of this Apple Music service.
I offered up the "big 4" labels so that we could easily see the math of who is richest in this deal at the end of the trial period: 28% right off the top for Apple, 72%/4 = 18% if only the 4 labels got all of the rest and divided it equally. I fully understand that there are hundreds of labels to also share in that 72%, so that 18% number for any of the big 4 may be exaggerated, but factoring that in only makes the point even more. If we imagine maybe 25% being shared among the hundreds of labels that are not the big 4, the 47% that remains divided by 4 = about 12% each for the big 4 labels. Of course, some labels will be more powerful/important than others so maybe there is an 18%er in there. I doubt there is a 28%er in the group, so Apple stands alone (if my speculation here is logical; please correct it if it is not).
These artists that we want to share in the risk so badly are only getting fractions out of that 72%, slivers of money that they have won in agreements forged with their labels, often so overwhelmingly in favor of those labels that even the word "scraps" might be overly implying their cuts. Maybe it should be crumbs or slivers of crumbs?
That said, given that Apple has the most ROI potential in this venture, it seems like they should naturally shoulder the bulk of the risk too. If 1,000 of us wanted to start up a new for-profit business together and I wanted to take 28% right off the top and 999 of you would then slice up the other 72% among yourselves, who should put the most money at risk? Shall we equally share in those risks even though I have the most upside ROI potential because I'm first in line at the revenue trough after this trial? Oh, by the way, you 999 basically have complete control over the product to be sold here, you having invested the money to make it out of your own pockets. This service that I want us to offer is nothing and has ZERO profit potential without your contribution of the content I want to sell this way.
Again, I'll simply offer that if we sub out the Apple name for Samsung or Google, would we be as passionately for those corporations vs. the artists as we are in this scenario? Conceptually, if the deal is the same, we should feel exactly the same and arguing just as passionately for those corporations if how we really feel about this is what we are writing down. However, if we would change our tune if it was Samsung or Google instead of Apple, then we're not writing our own opinions but compromising our opinions in favor of towing a company line... which, as of yesterday, is no longer even that company's line anymore- they've reversed course to side with paying the artists during the trial period.
Did they have to do that? No. Were they forced into it by Taylor Swift? No. They chose to do it. Why? Because they apparently see enough potential ROI post-trial to make it worth taking a little extra hit by paying the artists on who's work the entire service (and it's future profitability) fully depend. Personally, not only do I think that was the right PR thing to do but I think it was the right thing to do too (and I wrote that well before the reversal decision in the other thread). It will end up helping Apple make this whole thing more successful in the end, for everyone involved. And if that decision is good enough for Apple...
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People are grasping at straws, aren't they?
The contract here basically states that a photographer who wants to take pictures of Taylor Swift CAN do this, but if none of their photographs are used, they aren't paid.
This is standard for paparazzi photographers, sports and concert photographers. Get the shot, or you don't get paid. You might be in Hollywood working 16 hour days for 2 weeks without getting paid, because what you get paid for is a good shot that somebody else wants. That's just normal.
There's a difference between jobs you get paid by the hour or salary for, and jobs you get paid for doing something. Are painters paid by the hour or by the painting?
I don't doubt it was a stunt. That makes it worse.
Second, they didn't suddenly rework the numbers. They knew the numbers already.
No positive PR, just PR. It was out of the news in one day. What it did do though is open more eyes to their shenanigans. Long-term prognosis, not good.
my point wasn't so much about "hey, call the person out publicly.. quote them etc".. it was more about hey, go find that example for yourself.. (saying "i know a number of people who would of done it doesn't count)..and when you realize you can't do it, make the connection that your original comment is just made up in your own head.. it's a false statement and means nothing.. the only people who like fanboy comments are other people who also like calling people fanboys.
it's just a stupid word with hollow meaning.. in the post prior to the one i've quoted, your 'advice' was about quickly identifying who's set in their ways etc.. well, the same applies to you.. people using 'fanboy' and the like are very quickly identified as those who speak empty words and should be taken with a grain of salt.
That contract is with (often freelance) photographers who want to make money selling pictures taken inside the concerts to magazines. In other words, they want to profit off her performance.
As we all know, many artistic performance venues (e.g. theaters) do not allow photographs at all. Yet the photographers are allowed to come in, sit in special locations, take and sell photographs of her performance, without having to share their profits.
In return for granting such special privileges, the contract limits how and where those photographs can be used, and at what times and locations they can be taken.
It's no different than the way that photographers claim copyright of the pictures we pay them to take of our kids for a school picture. The copyright owners wants control.
If I were a star's manager, I'd want the same kind of control over the copyrighted performances.
For photography, the copyrights are not so clear as for music.
For example, you take a photo of person on street.
Do you have a right to publish that photo?
Its quite ambiguous.
For example, you take a photo of person on street.
Do you have a right to publish that photo?
Its quite ambiguous.
This kind of mentality really irritates me. In what way are you the copyright owner of your child's photos? You did not take them, so how exactly does the copyright belong to you over an art that you did not create? With how you describe it, why didn't you just take a shot with your cell phone? Then you'd be the "copyright" owner. But instead you've contracted it out to someone else ... why?
Thank god we have you to judge us.
I think some of this is in your head bud, just from reading your reply.
This is off topic now and waste of peoples time. If you cannot understand the cynicism / sarcasm of my comment..... Not my fault! Sure I've been here too long and maybe I am more cynical.
Have a good day sir!