Apple's CEO Tim Cook officially unveiled his company’s streaming platform, Apple Music. The service is now being presented as the “next chapter in music.”

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Apple Music looks like a cross between SoundCloud, Spotify and a radio station. The worldwide launch date is June 30th, and here’s what the average user can expect:

1. All of iTunes on demand.

If it’s on iTunes, it’s available to stream. Including The Beatles. Apple Music features over 30 million tracks.

2. Beats 1

The first worldwide 24/7 radio station run by Zane Lowe of BBC 1 fame. The goal is to “move the needle” and outshine the mundane terrestrial stations. A place that Lowe himself attests is run by “real music fans.” Zane Lowe in Los Angeles, Ebro Darden in New York, and Julie Adenuga in London will be the three anchors for the constantly streaming station.

3. Top Notch Curation

The world’s leading music brands and tastemakers are all part of the Apple Music curation process. Suggestion algorithms are too rigid on their own so Apple has employed tastemakers across the industry to craft the perfect playlists for any occasion.

4. Streaming goes social

Connect provides one place to connect with fans for established, new, and unsigned artists. Share music, videos, pictures, thoughts, and more all within the Apple Music app.

5. Videos without the ads

In addition to all of the music on iTunes, the tens of thousands of music videos on the service are all available for streaming as well — free of advertising.

6. There’s no such thing as freemium.

Apple Music is free for the first three months but is $9.99 a month after that. Family plans for 6 people are just $14.99 a month.

7. It supports Android

Android-users won’t miss out on the Apple Music experience. But not until this fall.


This definitely does look like a new chapter in the world of music streaming and could really put pressure up on Tidal & Spotify. Lets just all hope Apple Music doesn't forget to look after the most important people of its creation...... the Artists.

 

Ebro Darden aka Old man Ebro pretty much single-handedly destroyed Hot 97 here in NY while he was the stations programming and music director. He only plays what the record labels want him to play. He's been accused of taking money to play records. He's not very well liked here in NY within the Hip Hop community of artist.

He doesn't care about the music and never will.

 

Yet another scheme to get $10 per month. When will it end? Just how may $10's per month are we expected to pay?

 

(After Google saying it will block "non-core" flash on Chrome [ads], the shock is just too much to bare)

As many as you can and want to.

 

I am sure you know that the contract between Sony and Spotify has leaked recently:

http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2015/05/19/spotify-gave-sony-51-5m-in-advances-and-ad-space-over-three-years

It turns out that Spotify pays Sony
$17 million
+ 60% * premium subscribers payments * share of Sony in streams
+ $0.00225 per stream of free users regardless of the revenue they generate
+ $9 million of free ads available for Sony to use or resell at profit
+ $15 million of almost free ads (discounted) available for Sony

After that, if Spotify has still money, it's for the UMG and Warners of the world

And finally, for YOU, if there's still money in the pot after all these guys, and after your Tunecore, Kobalt or Believe digital distributor has taken its share, you get the money!!

So who's to blame?

 

Apple is one of those shitty companies that just won't go away. If their past ventures are a yardstick then they'll fuck this up royally. Beats 1...somebody fetch my gun.

 

And let me point out something for the count of streams:

User A pays $10
Listens to quality music 10 times in the month

User B pays $10
Listens to crap music 1000 times in the month

Users C-D-E-F-G-H pays 0 (freemium teenagers)
Listen to crap music all day long, say 6000 times in the month

(Assuming like for Spotify there are 3 free users for every 1 premium user)

---

Now let's do the maths:

Revenues
Premium Tier = 2 * $10
Free Tier = 6 * 0
TOTAL REVENUE = $20

Mandatory Costs
Minimum guarantee for free streams Cost = 6000 * $0.00225 = $13.50

Remaining revenue = $6.50
Spotify Share (40%) = $2.60

Remaining revenue for labels = $3.90

Quality music ratio = 10 streams / 1010 total premium streams = 0.0099
Crap music ratio = 1000 streams / 1010 total premium streams = 0.991

TOTAL QUALITY MUSIC PAYOUT = 0.0099 * $3.90 = $0.039

Which makes $0.0039 per stream, not far from the reality indeed...
If user A, who doesn't listen to craps, had bought the album for $10 or even the single for $1, spending less than Spotify's premium, the quality musician would have gotten this kind of amount instead of $0.039 and instead of financing crap music produced by Sony (and others with a similar deal).


Notes:
- by "quality music", I mean music you don't stream in a loop doing your cooking or something else without listening, original stuff, soundtracks, etc
- by "crap music", I mean very short songs that could be addictive and listened to as loops
- although I used the terms quality / crap, this is just my own view. The maths above just show that streaming tends to use premiums paid by skilled listeners to pay labels (artists) streamed for free all day long by teenagers listening to repetitive pop songs you hear everywhere all day long (short songs with an addictive very simple hook, say shake it off).


Not to mention that people check what's popular just to make up their mind. So crap songs get one or two streams from EVERYBODY simply to know what's going on. You're forced to listen once to Shake it off, Dark Horse, or anything like that because you have to know what it's like. It makes millions of streams from people who actually don't like these songs.
But for any quality track, millions of people won't visit it just to check it out
First few streams by each user should be delayed in the accounting to see if you come back and listen more to it....

 

You are NOT going to make big money with streaming.
Even big artists streaming millions don't do it.

Sell your own tour tickets, t-shirts, headphones, music softs... and now, you are making money.

Streaming will get you even LESS money than selling mp3. Companies like Apple know it. That's why they make it : to increase their income.
They are not here to support artists. Even if you die homeless, they will find another one to replace you faster than light.
Artists are considered like any worker : milked to the bone, and disposable. They need to be very clever to reverse the system and earn their living.
Streaming is just free advertisement...for you

 

Apple is raping people on their computers and now they're thinking artists need rape too. Naughty naughty Apple. No raping.

 

Apple is certainly not launching this for artists.

They want you to customize your music environment as much as possible, playlists, purchases, followed people and vice versa, chats, itunes account to lock you with their service without the possibility of migrating to Google or Spotify (or at the expense of loosing at best a lot of time).

Not sure they want to make big bucks with streaming but they will carefully think of a mecanism to lock you with future iDevices that you pay $800 knowing there're worth $200 at best.
Much more money than streaming


btw, the only fact that you will be required to launch the fabulous iTunes app just to play a track is going to be a no-go for me

 

Fuck Apple and everything about them, don't own any of their shit and never will.....but I'm sure the iSheep are counting down the minuets on their apple watches and ready to dig deep into their apple wallets when this launches

 

Fuck off with that we invented it first shit, I currently have 29581 internet radio stations i can listen to on Radiosure(nice simple free internet radio player), most of which are 24/7 and a provide a mix of styles and content to listen too.

Only good thing about this is that we got rid of zane lowe out of the UK, mwaahaaha, you're welcome to him merica.

Tastemakers, lol, some anonymous record company dickhead trying to get people to listen to his latest shit artists shit music, fuck them.

Fuck social media, go down the pub, meet your mates, have a laugh, get drunk and talk shit all night, thats fucking being social.

Should say "tens of thousands of shit music videos, all with loads of nearly naked women looking lovingly at some crap rapper trying to appear tough"

Nice idea but "Apple Music won't forget to look after the most important people of its creation......The Crapple and record company executives" is what this is really about. Artists are 2 a penny, easily replacable commodities to Crapple music.

 

So if I don't drink I'm antisocial?

 

Oh for God's sake Apple, do somethng original, exciting, ground-breaking. This is boring. Doesn't draw me in at all

 

Your hatred for this company is almost quite comical. I bet you've never owned/used a Mac or iOs device.

 

If you don't drink anything, then you would die, thats definitely antisocial

I stopped drinking alcohol years ago, didn't stop me from going to the pub. I found i could have just as good a time by staying sober and i felt much better in the morning as well.

So treat getting drunk as a metaphor for having a good time then.

 

Lol, this isn't going to end well.

 

Fuck apple and their lame ideas...

and fuck the apple devotees supporting this shitty company...

 

Seeing that the press release (at least as re-pulished here) says nothing about how much musical artists are to be paid per-stream, the service is obviously slanted in favor of the user - and, of course, of Apple.

Now I, as a musical content-creator (to which I've been reduced, down from "artist," and even below "dancing monkey" at which peanuts are thrown every now and then), I have to make the decision as to whether to pull my music off iTunes, where I have it for SALE, not for PISSING-AWAY in a "stream."

Oh - and the "social" features? I'm supposed to keep-up with who's "liking" and commenting and responding and blablabla so on? "Bullshit" to that, too. How'bout people "connect" with me via PayPal? When Bandcamp introduced its "social" features - and started taking an extra 5% for itself from sales - it degraded what had been a dignified, if limited, retail download venue.

Stuff like this makes me wonder aloud, "What do people think 'music' is, anymore?" Free "content" to exploit to sell apps, subscriptions, and even hardware?

I need to promote my music in order for it to find its audience, perchance to make some money in the process, but when I know from the outset that the people who run such services live a LOT better than I do, and that they stand to earn more money from my music than I will (and are being given egregious legal latitude to under-pay me for using my music to do so), I'm on the brink of just saying, "F*ck this shit," and - what? Committing suicide? Throwing a brick through the windshield of an Apple CEO's SUV? Releasing my music only on vinyl? The absence of a realistic alternative should say a lot.

 

It was supposed to be comical, it was a joke. I own a few Apple products that were given to me as gifts from an iPad to an iPhone and I've been in IT for as long as some of the guys here have been alive working with all platforms. Even if that weren't the case I don't think you have to own a product to hate what a company is about. My hate for Apple begins long before any of the bullshit they manufacture.