Spotify

Update: Apple has responded to Swift’s blog post.

Earlier this week, it was confirmed that Taylor Swift’s latest album ‘1989’ will not be available on Apple Music, Apple’s streaming music service launching on June 30th with iOS 8.4. She has written a blog post on Tumblr explaining her position.

We don’t ask you for free iPhones. Please don’t ask us to provide you with our music for no compensation.

Swift explains that she respects Apple for their innovation but says the terms associated with the Apple Music free trial are ‘unlike this historically progressive and generous company’. Swift says that under the 3 month free trial period, artists and rights holders are not paid at all for the duration and notes Apple has plenty of money to reimburse the artists for their work. Swift says that she is holding back 1989 not because she cannot support herself but as a retaliation for ‘the new artist or band that has just released their first single’.

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Suggestions that Apple will pay music owners just 58% of subscription payments for its Apple Music service are not true, says the company. Robert Kondrk, the Apple VP who has been working with Eddy Cue on negotiating deals with music labels, says that company actually pays a little more than the industry-standard 70% figure.

In the U.S., Apple will pay music owners 71.5 percent of Apple Music’s subscription revenue. Outside the U.S., the number will fluctuate, but will average around 73 percent, he told Re/code in an interview. Executives at labels Apple is working with confirmed the figures.

The 58% number doing the rounds earlier this month appears to be based on a misunderstanding: that’s the usual cut for the label, which owns the recording; the publisher, which owns the rights to the song itself, gets a 12% cut. Add the two together, and you get the 70% number that is standard for streaming music services.

But the most interesting revelation to me was that Apple is not paying music labels a single cent for tracks streamed during the three-month free trial period … 
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Spotify is almost synonymous with streaming music. It may not quite have managed the Google trick of becoming a verb, but it’s pretty much the default way to stream music.

Spotify has 75M active users and, despite doubts in many quarters about its ability to convert free users to paid subscribers, it has succeeded there too. The company announced this week that it now has more than 20M paid subscribers, half of them added in the past 12 months, at a rate of one every three seconds.

It seems hard to imagine that any new entrant into the market, even one with Apple’s clout, could steal its crown. And yet early market leaders often look unassailable – until they are left behind. Look at Nokia or BlackBerry. I wondered back in February whether Apple could decimate the competition, and now the company has thrown the wraps off Apple Music, I think it’s time to revisit the question …

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Apple announced its streaming music service at WWDC this week after months of much anticipation. The service includes many of the features that our own Mark Gurman reported on months in advance. Earlier this year, I broke down my own thoughts on what features the service needed to have in order to convince me to switch from Spotify. Those requested features included excellent support for my previously acquired music; well-designed, cross-platform apps; exclusive content; competitive pricing; and a killer radio functionality.

When news broke last year that Apple was in talks to acquire Beats, my initial response was concern that the subscription music service I’d only just started to love would change into something different. Then Apple actually bought Beats.

What happened next is Beats Music stopped all significant consumer-facing development completely. Apple TV gained a channel for the service as Apple started pushing the service to iOS users, but Beats Music never came to the Mac and the promised CarPlay app was never released.

When the Apple Watch debuted in April, both Beats Music and iTunes Radio were missing from the platform. That halt in Beats Music development meant that Spotify — which was already on the Mac and CarPlay — had months to grow and introduce compelling features to make it a better subscription music service.

While we won’t know how well Apple Music performs until it launches in three week, these six promised features will make it superior to Beats Music for me:
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Contrary to many assumptions being posted this morning, Apple Music doesn’t allow you to stream the entire iTunes library – just most of it. As The Verge notes, The Beatles are among the exceptions.

Even Beats Music got this wrong, stating in its FAQ that Apple Music gives you everything you get with Beats “plus, you can play all of the songs in the iTunes catalog” … 
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Streamed music is great for having access to almost everything, but it isn’t always ideal when you’re on the move thanks to patchy data coverage and carrier data caps. While Apple didn’t mention it yesterday, it has now confirmed to Re/code that Apple Music supports offline listening. The feature is also listed in a feature checklist on Apple’s website.

As an Apple Music member you can add anything from the Apple Music library — a song, an album or a video — to your collection. And that’s just the warm-up act. From there you can create the perfect playlist from anything you’ve added. You can save it for offline listening and take it on the road.

Apple didn’t give any details, but offline listening is likely to work in the same way as Spotify Premium … 
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Roughly one year after spending $3 billion to acquire Beats, a speaker and headphone company cofounded by music industry veterans Dr Dre and Jimmy Iovine, Apple has officially revealed its all-new streaming music service built on that massive acquisition. Apple Music, as we first reported the subscription music service would be called, is the company’s answer to on-demand music services like Spotify. As part of the 2014 acquisition, Apple gained its own subscription music competitor in Beats Music, although the new Apple Music service is the company’s first to be built by the Cupertino company. Details below:
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It’s Monday, June 8th and nearly time for Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference. We’ve already run down what we’re expecting from the conference, ranging from a significant iOS 9 update for iPads, iPhones, and iPod touches with a focus on quality, an upgraded version of OS X with the same core focus, the new Apple Music streaming service along with the new iTunes Radio, and the native software development kit (SDK) for the Apple Watch. We’ll be following the news closely from before the keynote, during the event, and after the event, and we’ll be live updating this post with the latest information out of the WWDC Keynote.

You can find our live updates and analysis below, as we get closer to show time.

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Apple is aiming to sign up a massive 100M subscribers for its streaming music service, according to a source cited by the Associated Press (reproduced in the NY Times). This would be more than double the subscriptions for all other streaming music services combined.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry says that existing worldwide streaming subscriptions total around 41M across all services. The market leader, Spotify, has around 4.7M subscribers in the USA … 
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Jay-Z’s recently launched Tidal music streaming service, a competitor to Apple’s own services in more ways than one, is today getting a big update right before the debut of the new Apple Music streaming service next week at WWDC. A desktop app beta for both Mac and Windows, $4.99 student pricing, and ticketing features through Ticketmaster integration, all help set a high bar for Apple to impress us with its own announcements next week.

The new desktop app (pictured above) is arriving in beta and brings a few features that weren’t previously possible with the mobile and web apps. The announcement today also includes a refreshed design for the mobile apps:
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Apple is ready to show the first fruits of its Beats acquisition next week. As we first reported in early March, Apple is planning to introduce its long-awaited Beats-based streaming music service at its Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, June 8th. Blending Apple interface design and features from the Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine-created Beats Music app, Apple’s service, known internally as “Apple Music,” is built to take on Spotify and Pandora with several new features and a subscription model. Additionally, Apple is working on overhauling its widely panned iTunes Radio service by striking deals with popular artists and DJs. Below, we detail Apple’s plans for both Apple Music and the new iTunes Radio in an extensive roundup.

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Spotify announced yesterday that it would be redesigning its iOS application with support for new features like original video clips and podcasts. A few glimpses of the updated version of the music streaming app were shown off during the announcement, but today a tipster has supplied us with a collection of screenshots from a beta build of the upcoming release.

Below you’ll find a gallery demonstrating the podcast integration, running speed-based tempo detection, and more. Almost every corner of the app has been completely overhauled with a new design. Many of the icons in the older app have been removed in favor of simple text labels, and a host of new features have been added.

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[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fZBqV_yMq4]

Spotify is announcing some big updates to its music streaming service today that brings a number of new features alongside more content in the form of video clips, audio shows, and podcasts.
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Ahead of the highly anticipated launch of Apple’s streaming music service next month, Spotify today has revealed a new agreement with longtime Apple partner Starbucks. Spotify will team up with the coffee giant to offer enhanced music playback controls for both users and employees in 7,000 U.S.-based Starbucks locations.

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Update: We’ve gotten word from a Spotify spokesperson that the Free model isn’t going anywhere. Director of Communications at Spotify Graham James told me “This is totally false.  Our model is working.” 

Digital Music News is claiming that Spotify is coming under pressure from music labels to end its free, ad-supported service, limiting users to a three-month free trial.

The three-month ‘proposal,’ advanced most principally by major labels Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment, would allow current, free-access, ad-supported (or ‘freemium’) subscribers to continue their plans for 6 months, while new users would be limited to three months only.

Coincidentally or not, Universal Music Group is one of the labels specifically mentioned in two investigations into whether Apple is attempting to stifle competition in the run up to launching its own streaming music service … 
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Apple’s upcoming Beats-based streaming music service will likely be named “Apple Music” and will have deep social networking integration for artists, according to industry sources briefed on the plans for the new service.

Taking a page out of the discontinued iTunes Ping feature from earlier this decade, the service will allow artists to have their own pages within the streaming music service that they can use to post track samples, photos, videos, and concert updates.

Artists will also be able to share the content of other artists in an effort of cross-promotion. For example, all-gold Apple Watch wearer Kanye West could promote a new album from Taylor Swift on his “Apple Music” artist page, if he so chooses…

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Spotify, which is widely believed to be behind the antitrust allegations that led to both EC and DOJ investigations into Apple, has now added a fresh complaint. The Verge reports Spotify is complaining that the 30% cut Apple takes from in-app Premium subscriptions in the iOS app amounts to an “Apple tax.”

Apple charges a 30 percent fee toward any sales through its App Store, and that includes subscription services. That means if Spotify wants to sell its premium subscription service — which usually costs $9.99 a month — through the App Store, it has to raise the price 30 percent higher to $12.99 to pull in the same revenue, while Apple can still offer Beats at a lower price. Spotify and many others in the music industry believe Apple’s App Store tax gives them an unfair advantage over the competition.

One unnamed music industry source said that Apple taking 30% was “**cking bullsh**” … 
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Apple’s upcoming music streaming service comes at an interesting time in the industry. Jay-Z recently relaunched his own streaming music service dubbed Tidal, recruiting help from other A-list artists like Rhianna, Alicia Keys, Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, and Kanye West. There are existing services from Spotify, Beats, Google, and others. All of these offerings have their own pros and cons, but I’ve used them all and none of them accomplish streaming music perfectly. Apple now has the opportunity to take the best features of each service and offer its own competitive service.

Last week, Ben Lovejoy broke down exactly what Apple’s streaming music service would need for him to stop buying music. Even without Apple’s new service, I’ve already done that. Most of my music is streamed from Spotify. Rarely do I actually buy albums on iTunes, and I almost never buy physical CDs. The problem with this approach is no streaming music service gets it 100 percent right for me.

I’m hoping that Apple incorporates the best of each existing subscription music service into its own upcoming music service. What are those key points? Let’s discuss…

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I was an early adopter of digital music (you hide your surprise well). I bought my first mp3 player in 1998, some three years before the first iPod. It cost a silly amount of money and stored exactly one album at a time in its 64MB (not GB) of flash memory.

Me being me, I went through a few different generations of mp3 player before Apple completely changed the game with the iPod. Ironically, by adopting a less sophisticated technology–a hard drive in place of flash memory–Apple created a far better product. One that allowed us to carry around 80 albums at a time. I bought one the day it went on sale, having by then finished ripping all my CDs to mp3.

When the 160GB iPod came out in 2007, I again bought one immediately. That was large enough to hold my entire music collection at the time. I not only carried it everywhere with me, I also plugged it into my hifi at home and to the AUX socket of my car stereo. At which point, I started wondering why I still had a wall full of CDs … 
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In case you hadn’t heard, Jay-Z is this week launching (relaunching) the Tidal music service he recently acquired along with a lot of help from industry friends. The company is hoping its model is innovative and helps artists earn more, but its UI for the web app appears to be a shameless copy of Spotify, as you can see in the comparison screenshot: Tidal above, Spotify below.
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