Apple doesn't steal anything. If you want payments to go through the App Store, you pay an amount. But Spotify adds to their cost if you pay through the store to cover their costs. Spotify made a deal, it's not stealing.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple's New Music Royalty Proposal Would Make Streaming Costlier for Free Services Like Spotify
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Apple doesn't steal anything. If you want payments to go through the App Store, you pay an amount. But Spotify adds to their cost if you pay through the store to cover their costs. Spotify made a deal, it's not stealing.
You don't wanna call it theft? Lets call it a rip off, lets call it milking the userbase, a disservice to the music industry and a disservice to artists. 0% profits on Mac from Spotify, 30% profits on iOS at the expense of artists. It's as clear as that and it's wrong. So please Apple, don't even try to pass this off as you caring about artists.
It's about greed and killing the competition's free tier.
Apple has submitted a proposal to the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board calling for a simplified way to pay songwriters and music publishers for streaming music, according to Billboard. While the change would benefit labels, artists and publishers, it would make it more difficult for streaming services like Spotify to continue offering free tiers.
Apple's suggested rate is 9.1 cents per 100 plays, which would make the songwriting royalties for 100 streams equal to the royalties for a single song download. However, the change would make it more expensive for companies like Spotify and YouTube to offer free music tiers.
The current system sees streaming companies paying songwriters and publishers between 10.5 and 12 percent of their revenue using what Billboard terms a "complicated formula." The money is then divided into public performance and mechanical royalties, which is then paid to publishers and "collected societies." Currently, Apple and other streaming music providers don't have to pay publishers the statutory rate set by the Royalty Board because they can negotiate their own deals. However, negotiations between publishers and streaming services would start at a different place should Apple's proposal become rule.
The Copyright Royalty Board, which is made up of a panel of three judges, is still in the early stages of determining potential statuary rates for 2018 to 2022 so it's unclear whether Apple's proposal would take hold or ever come to be.
While Apple Music has garnered about 15 million paying subscribers in the year since its launch, rival Spotify has twice as many, with the company citing Apple's entrance into paid music streaming as a boon to its business. Despite user and revenue growth, Spotify continues to operate at a loss due to expensive royalties and revenue sharing with music labels, with recent losses growing 10 percent to $195.7 million.
Article Link: Apple's New Music Royalty Proposal Would Make Streaming Costlier for Free Services Like Spotify
Your "group" is not the only creative group that produces a product and doesn't always get paid. There are software developers, artists, architects, lawyers, actors, and plenty of "creative people" who sometimes have their ideas copied/stolen. There are no absolute guarantees in life and for you to insist on government to protect you every step of the way from cradle to grave is pathetic. So live with it or come up with another way to make money from your creativity if you're not getting paid.
And if you think Apple really cares about you and is doing this to protect creative folks, I have a bridge in the Sahara Desert you can purchase.
I believe I have just read another one.
This is actually a really positive light upon musicians and artists. People don't seem to realize that artists make quite a bit of money not only from their tours and such but also from royalties. A friend of mine made $18,000 in a couple of years due to writing music for a Flowbee ad and the royalties from that helped him make a downpayment on their house. So to be the consumer and skimp, wanting free this and that, it'll eventually hurt some people financially. So doing some numbers if you're a popular artist and your one song is played over 1,000,000 times you still make $910 from that. Now times that by an album (9 songs, and we'll say each is played equivalently the same), that's $9100... You could simply be making 6 digit figures alone on your music being played on Apple Music. Of course this is all speculation and I'm sure Apple probably takes a portion but hey, musicians and artists need to make a living. There's licensing and music libraries that help but there's also this that's another opportunity for artists to make money to invest in more gear/studio time to create more music. Just a thought.
Apple is all about taking care of Apple as they should be. However, they are certainly more pro-artist than Spotify by a long shot. Not to mention that even if this doesn't pass, Apple appears much more pro-artist and that could land them to additional exclusives, not to mention some artist maybe tempted to pull their music from Spotify all together. It's a win win for Apple. I personally don't give a rats rear end rather Apple is doing it for themselves and in turn helping the artist too. It's a brilliant move and only someone with their head in there rear end can't see that.
Because of consent decrees (i.e., conditions accepted voluntarily to end litigation). And in case this wasn't clear from the article, the statutory rates are voluntary. Anyone can negotiate royalties directly with the copyright holders.
Never bought a cd in my entire life. Just never saw the point in paying 16€ for something you could find elsewhere within minutes for free.
HOWEVER at some point i guess 4 or so years ago i ended up trying the free tire of Spotify for a while. half a year later i decided to give premium a shot and i have been a premium subscriber since then.
Now that Apple and Tidal try their exclusive BS i download these songs elsewhere out of spite.
The only reason Spotify isn't doing exclusives is because they can't afford too, not because they don't want too. Don't be a fool! Fact is they cannot continue to lose money at the rate they are and that doesn't have CRAP to do with APPLE that is their Business model that sucks !
What a load of crap. Apple doesn't set the Spotify subscription price. Spotify does. Spotify could have left out in-App subscriptions from the beginning and done all sign ups through their website. Like Amazon and many others do. Then there would also be 0% on iOS.
Apple isn't going to kill Spotify's fee tier. Spotify will do that on their own. It was THREIR choice to lose money on the free tier hoping they'd convert those users to paid. They're not converting enough, and so they're whining like the crybabies they are because their unsustainable business model is about to come crashing down. So they try to blame Apple or anyone else for their lousy business model.
They find it a ready platform to spread their rants. They know that they will get responses and thus get the self gratification and increase their feelings of self importance they crave. (Like Junkies searching for their next fix)
Yea, so Pro, that they originally refused to pay any royalties during the three-month free trial, basically giving away someone's else's property for their own gain and actually claiming the gesture was from Apple.
just as with iBooks, apple's music plan would have the effect of increasing overall costs for consumers by making what is currently free not feasible. both iBooks and this Music plan were both set out ostensibly to raise prices so that content creators get paid more, but in both cases both work to limit competition by making it impossible for amazon or Spotify to be free to charge whatever they want.
amazon and Spotify should be able to charge whatever they want, subject to whatever the agreement between them and the artist/rights holders specifies.
Last edited:
Yes and they caught flack for it as they should have and they reversed course. Just as Spotify will have to do on the free tier because they can't keep losing money and refusing to pay the artist as much as they should be. By the way the music companies agreed to allow Apple to do this in their deal, but again once they realized the way the artist felt they changed course. Too bad Spotify continues to rip off investors by not doing what they know they will eventually have to do to because if they don't and they don't get anymore investment dollars they will shut down. I guess that will be Apple fault though because even though they were in the music business long before Spotify was a fleeting thought.. they shouldn't have started Apple music! LOL
Horrendous
adjective
Extremely unpleasant, horrifying or terrible.
"she suffered horrendous injuries"
I really don't think any app user experience can be called horrendous, just say you don't like it.
keep the gov. out of this and most other things!
Right, because who needs regulation when corporations are already deemed "private citizens" under the Supreme Court's 2010 interpretation in "Citizen United vs the FEC". Corporations always have the consumers best interests at heart, just as the US government. Oh, wait.
Neither is perfect, but at least one has kept corporations in check. "Ma Bell", anyone? Think your ISP is expensive now, if the FCC didn't intervene on your behalf you would be paying much more for your internet service. TWC was denied their merger with Comcast but "quietly" allowed Charter to take over, with ~75%+ of your cable services now provided under one national conglomerate. So before you praise Capitalism as "amazing" and regulation as "Marxist", I'd recommend studying up on history and learning very important differences.
Perhaps you should look up the definition of the word steal. It does not mean what you think it means. Words do have actual meanings.
Last edited:
It's cheap to invent hypothetical counter-factuals and pretend they're arguments. If you think about it (and there's plenty of evidence), the worst and most expensive service you can get is when the government has monopoly of something.
Not that any ISP deal has anything to do with the government involvement in the music industry, or that Apple is not trying plain old cronysm here by getting its competition in hot water through government diktat, instead of providing value to its customers.
[doublepost=1468656710][/doublepost]
Correct, that is not theft. It is however a deeply unethical practice, to force subscription providers to offer the same in-app price (which Apple taxes at 30%, effectively removing their profit margin) as they offer on their website or other sales channels that have nothing to do with Apple.
Wait, you have people literally smashing down your front door and barging into your house to advertise to you? And you're taking time to comment here, instead of retreating to a safe place and calling the police?
[doublepost=1468657578][/doublepost]
You keep trying to make it sound like the 30% is something Apple has imposed in order to hurt Spotify's music business. Please learn some history. The 30% price structure was in place the day the App Store opened. Spotify chose to put an app in the store knowing full well what the pricing structure is. That is not Apple setting out to hurt Spotify, that's Spotify repeatedly bashing their head against the wall and blaming Apple for the wall that was already there, instead of blaming themselves for... repeatedly bashing their head against the wall.
If you cannot defeat your enemy (Spotify)... use the cash (Apple's) to do so...
This is nice in the short term for those who live on music (though the problem is mainly all the intermediaries such as labels, distributors and so on... the musicians get barely nothing) but in the medium-long term this is aimed at becoming an oligopoly of Apple, Google and Amazon. And when that happens, we will have the best and most innovative Apple Music ever (never seen before and of course invented by Apple, because inventions are only by Apple) at the greatest price ever (so take it or leave it because there is not much more alternative and the existing one by then will have pretty much the same prices)
This is nice in the short term for those who live on music (though the problem is mainly all the intermediaries such as labels, distributors and so on... the musicians get barely nothing) but in the medium-long term this is aimed at becoming an oligopoly of Apple, Google and Amazon. And when that happens, we will have the best and most innovative Apple Music ever (never seen before and of course invented by Apple, because inventions are only by Apple) at the greatest price ever (so take it or leave it because there is not much more alternative and the existing one by then will have pretty much the same prices)
Depends. Spotify allows you to play any song you want on your Mac or iPad or PS4 for free. On iPhone it's shuffle only mode unless you pay. But yea there are ads every once in a while.
Uh, you do realize Apple has a ridiculously low market share compared to Windows, right? Windows vs. OS X is no competition.
Uh... They ARE able to charge whatever they want. They could increase their price, they could not offer a free tier. As others have said, this is about Spotify's free tier being a terrible business model for them. They have an unsustainable number of free tier subscribers. This is Apple's fault how? Apple is using Spotify against itself.
Honestly, this is probably a well reasoned response to Spotify's bitching. Apple basically said 'Okay, you wanna play? Let's play!' It's just business.
Hell, it's not like Google is going stop their free music radio, same with Pandora. There are other free streaming services out there. The point being: Spotify doesn't have the money to compete on the basis of free-tier. Everyone knows this, and Apple is simply taking advantage of it.
It's brilliant business move.
YES! Very much exactly this.
[doublepost=1468658781][/doublepost]
Downloading commercially produced movies from torrents is piracy. That's not a "free alternative". It's piracy. If you're downloading/sideloading .apk's of commercial apps (you went out of your way to list .apks as a separate case from free apps), that is also piracy. You are doing your part to steal from the artists, musicians, and developers who produced those items expecting to get paid for them.
The guy lives in China. Of course he pirates everything. Apple Music is $1.25 (10RMB/Month) in China and to some Chinese even THAT'S expensive. QQ Music is an on-demand streaming service. They offer a paid subscription, but most people don't do that. There are tons of websites (i.e. www.4399.com) where you can get APKs for local and big name games like Minecraft.
Piracy is HUGE problem in China, it's no wonder that a guy living in China and is probably Chinese refuses to pay for anything.