Apple Music Reveals How Much It Pays When You Stream a Song (wsj.com) 55
Apple Music told artists it pays a penny per stream in a letter reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. From a report: The disclosure, made in a letter to artists delivered Friday via the service's artist dashboard and sent to labels and publishers, is part of a growing effort by music-streaming services to show they are artist-friendly. For Apple, it can be seen as a riposte to Spotify Technology, which last month shared some details of how it pays the music industry for streams on its service. Apple's penny-per-stream payment structure -- which music-industry experts say can dip lower -- is roughly double what Spotify, the world's largest music-streaming service, pays music-rights holders per stream. Spotify pays an average of about one-third to one-half penny per stream, though its larger user base generates many more streams. Apple's payments come out of monthly subscription revenue from users. Artists, managers and lawyers, still reeling from the loss of touring revenue during the pandemic, have been calling for higher payouts from music streaming, which has grown rapidly in the past year. Many fans have joined the push to raise artists' compensation.
Fans and Compensation (Score:2)
Re: Fans and Compensation (Score:3)
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Re: Fans and Compensation (Score:5, Interesting)
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Yes. I noted that in the first part. Digitally is better.
You don't mention digital at all
My point was, if you buy music rather than stream it, you probably are not compensating the artist more than if you just stream it. What streaming does is split up song compensation more granularly. Micropayments to these artists for the number of times you hear a song is more economically efficient for you and the artist than otherwise.
This ignores compound interest as purchases are front loaded.
If you had to pay $0.99 for every song you wanted to listen to, you would listen to fewer songs
This is the history of music. The reality is that streaming largely replaces radio plays which had similarly poor royalty rates.
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If you buy a song, and play it 100 times, it is the same compensation.
This is meant to reflect the scenario where one buys a song from something like iTunes or Google Play. You can usually not buy one song on plastic. I continued with
If you buy a CD
I didn't know you wouldn't get what I meant in the first part.
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Well, $.99 per is not the only price model. For about 20/Month you can get a streaming solution that has a lot of tracks. You could also tune to free radio...
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If you buy a song, and play it 100 times, it is the same compensation. If you buy a CD and listen to it roughly the same amount of times, it is roughly the same compensation. If you listen to it less than that; it was not worth the plastic pollution you paid for.
Wow.
I guess Environmental Impact will be what is ultimately scrawled on the tombstone of Ownership.
Didn't quite see that one coming.
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It would seem streaming would be superior if you can get your song in the mix. A CD or download, you now have one s
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Except for the most popular artists, I suspect it really makes the most sense to use a print-on-demand service for CDs. I know many books are now sold this way, and a quick search shows that there are companies doing the same with CDs, including Amazon. So now a band can sell their CDs online, without having to press thousands, and they can price them based on the media costs plus the same price for buying the MP3s. And they can do a small bulk order (say 100) to have some to sell at their concerts.
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I'm curious if these are actually "pressed CDs" or do they just use writable CDs. I know some local artists have been burning their own CDs using printable CDs and then printing the label on them. If you don't look at the data side of the disc they can look a lot like pressed CDs.
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Does it matter? I suppose pressed CDs may be more durable. I think the number of players that care is exceedingly close to zero.
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go to a show
Uh, COVID isn't over yet...
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The recording industry is too busy looking stupid trying to pull the swords it fell on when it started going after streamers for streaming the licensed music from games by playing the games. So what happens? People stop playing the games that have licenced music, and thus people watching the stream never learn about it.
Great job breaking it hero RIAA.
What a rip off (Score:1)
What the hell, they streamed my song 1 BILLION times and I only made $10 million. That's a mere $5 million after taxes. As a comparison a half-way decent yacht is $20 million. You can't show your face in Monaco with anything less.
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https://thechive.com/wp-conten... [thechive.com]
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What the hell, they streamed my song 1 BILLION times and I only made $10 million. That's a mere $5 million after taxes.
A penny per play sounds awfully small, BUT,
The money you get from streaming is on top of the money you get from other sources.
What's that you say? CD sales have dropped to nearly zero? OK. Fair enough. So here's the giant elephant in the middle of the room that NOBODY wants to talk about:
Why do Spotify and Apple Music even exist in the first place? Why didn't musicians and record companies start music streaming services, years ago? Why don't musicians control music streaming and get the majority of th
Subscription fatigue was foreseen (Score:2)
Why didn't musicians and record companies start music streaming services, years ago?
I seem to remember at least one tried. People didn't want to subscribe to just Warner, just Sony, or just Universal. Smaller labels would have had an even tougher time attracting subscribers.
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And yet that's what we have now with TV streaming services. They never learn.
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Apple's penny-per-stream payment structure -- which music-industry experts say can dip lower -- is roughly double what Spotify, the world's largest music-streaming service, pays music-rights holders per stream. Spotify pays an average of about one-third to one-half penny per stream, though its larger user base generates many more streams.
In other words TFA is telling us that Apple pays a penny, Spotify pays a ha'penny or farthing.
Can anyone convert these medieval monetary values they've used into something that makes cents?
Should be by time (Score:5, Interesting)
Instead of paying per-song, pay per-minute. Or probably break it down to per six seconds. For every six seconds, the song should get one "credit" worth of listening. The payment to the publisher should be something like $0.01 for every 35 credits (I'm totally making that up, but it's probably in the range they receive now). This has several advantages. It means the service doesn't have to pay extra if people listen to part of a song and skip it (or conversely that the publisher still gets paid something if they don't now), so there's no reason to limit user skips like services do now (other than to force premium subscriptions). It means there's no incentive to keep songs short to maximize revenue, so songs can be whatever length works best. (There will be an incentive for artists to make longer songs, but less so for larger publishers as they won't care which artist is streaming as long as it's one of theirs.) This is also a model that could work for content besides popular music.
Re: Should be by time (Score:1)
In agadda davida baby
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I'm sure Genesis would have some witty retort about how short In agadda davida baby is, but they can't say it right now because Supper's Ready and they got to go.
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A revival (or continuation) of the AM radio Top-40 method.
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It should also be done as an absolute value, not as a percentage.
If you leave your streaming app of choice open to one artist all month, and never play anything other than that artist, they do not get your $10 subscription fee or whatever. All the money is put into a pool, and then your chosen band gets a share of the revenue equivalent to the piece of that pie that they represent. So if you're their only fan, they'll get basically nothing, even though 100% of your time went into listening to that band.
At l
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Jim Steinman would approve of this comment.
Bat Out of Hell - 9:52 (album) - 4:53 (single)
I'd Do Anything For Love - 12:01 (album) - 5:13 (single)
Pennies (Score:1)
Pennies have a lot of copper in them. I mean, of course the 1967 and earlier British penny before they went to decimal coinage. We have never had a penny in our coinage in the US. We have cents.
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Funny thing... Radio accounting always moves in dollars, even with "PennyPer" still in effect. See, Nielsen only estimates to a resolution of 100 listeners. So every cent is rounded to the nearest dollar each airplay...
um, okay (Score:2)
Spotify pays an average of about one-third to one-half penny per stream, though its larger user base generates many more streams.
Sorry, what moral outrage lesson exactly am I supposed to be learning here?
- That volume discounts are evil?
- That I should feel sorry for Walmart's slim profit margin, compared to some local boutique store's profit margin?
- or something else?
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Seems like you are the one trying awfully hard to be outraged.
Right, I wrote a whole article about how supposedly unfair the compensation amounts are. Then I posted it to a blog so we could all talk about it. I'm just so obsessed with it. What a weirdo I am.
Oh wait, I didn't do any of those things. I just made a comment on a blog.
The perfect service (Score:2)
All this really says, is that Apple's subscribers listen to fewer songs on average than Spotify's subscribers. I don't know the exact deal record companies have with Apple, but I strongly doubt it's any less generous than their deals with Spotify.
In any case, they agree to pay rights owners out of the share of all subscription fees, according to total number of plays across the service, minus a fixed share for the service.
So the perfect streaming service would be one where users practically didn't listen to
Musicians are smarter than you think (Score:2)
A smart musician might see some problems with that long term, but hey! If they were smart about economic matters they wouldn't be musicians in the first place.
How many times have you been paid for work that you did 5, 10, or even 20 years ago? Are you still receiving revenue from it?
A banker is smart about economic matters - they rent money to others for profit. Musicians rent their music to others. But, unlike the banker, a musician can literally create his rental property out of thin air. Wheth
Others with claims on your songs (Score:2)
But, unlike the banker, a musician can literally create his rental property out of thin air.
Not necessarily. If a song is too similar to another song, other musicians will have claims on this rental property. Sometimes these claims are uncovered before release (as with "Break My Heart" by Dua Lipa sounding like "Need You Tonight" by INXS), and sometimes they aren't (such as "My Sweet Lord" by George Harrison sounding like "He's So Fine" by The Chiffons written by Ronald Mack).
The risk of accidental copyright infringement is even more ominous for people creating music for video games distributed un
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You make a good point, but I've never heard of artists being sued for copyright infringement who also did not have the money to pay significant damages in the first place. The first part of discovery is usually an accounting of the other party's assets to determine if it's even worth pursuing a lawsuit in the first place. While the RIAA has been intransigent in the past, they have had to limit their battles to a few precedent-setting cases. If you know of independent musicians being sued for something o
Statutory damages under the CASE Act (Score:2)
The first part of discovery is usually an accounting of the other party's assets to determine if it's even worth pursuing a lawsuit in the first place.
With the small-claims court created by the (U.S.) CASE Act, future garnishable wages are likely to become enough of an asset.
If you know of independent musicians being sued for something other than a straight copy of another song, I'd be interested in knowing about it.
I guess that depends on what "independent" is supposed to mean. Over the years, different Slashdot users discussing the entertainment industry have used different definitions of "independent", and people end up talking past each other. I ask now before checking MCIR [gwu.edu] in order to avoid "no true Scotsman".
And one of the ways they limit it is by the phone-call from the lawyer, which is often sufficient to stop the practice.
That can be practical if it's just a cease and desist. It's a bit more troubling if
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With respect to independence, I consider an independent musician one who hasn't signed the rights over to the record company. When a musician creates a work-for-hire for a record company, the record company owns the copyright, and gets sued for cases of infringement. Typically, in that case it is corporation vs. corporation.
Which brings me to my second point: while our legal system is far from ideal, the fact is that using lawsuits to stifle competition is not unique to the music industry. Big tech co
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Yeah, exactly. That's the bait many musicians fall for, to the degree they think about the economic side at all when starting out. That's how they're not smart. Thanks for illustrating.
Your odds of making significant royalty mo
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I think you're missing a big part of the picture:
Now, you might think, well, the programmer made a better choice. But when you look more closely at the programmer, he's spent 4 years and $100k in tuition, for a career that will last about 10 years before he has to retrain. At 60 hours/week, he works 15 years in his career, plus 4 years in college (19+ years of effort) for a total of 710k -100k = $610k. That comes ou
Apple Music is also more expensive than Spotify (Score:2)
For example, in Argentina, spotify is ARS 139 which using credit card dollars (exchange rates are weird here) comes to U$S 0.85, under a dollar. Apple music for the same market is U$S 5,99 which is 7 times more expensive.
My point is, apple will never be able to address the same market since it it's unable/unwilling to adjust prices to to maximize income. In a sense, spotify is paying way more than Apple.
Support your favorite artists! (Score:2)
Support your favorite artists! Just leave AppleMusic playing one if their songs in a loop
Can't the artists renegotiate? (Score:2)
I am sympathetic for losses during 2020 due to the pandemic - but the music industry has access to the
Hard to figure out how this ends (Score:2)
We stream about 16 hours of music per day— it is always playing wherever we are. Even at Spotify’s rates that is pretty hard to build a sustainable business off of. I also find it really annoying, as I cannot properly link Spotify and Sonos via home automation. (If I could, rest assured I would be playing music somewhere in the house 24x7.)
Pennies from heaven (Score:1)
Missing a few friends... (Score:2)
Hey Analog_Hole organization... shouldn't 0-9 of you have shown up here by now. We're discussing one of your favorite topics: Music prices...
A Penny is apparenty 1 cent. (Score:2)
Who knew?