Apple Unveils Streaming Music Service

Yesterday Apple unveiled Apple Music, its long-awaited streaming music service. Via Gizmodo:

The basics: Apple Music doesn’t appear to have a free vibe, although starting June 30th, everyone will be offered a free three month subscription. Like everything other service out there, the premium price will be $10 per month. There’s also a $15 per month family plan for up to six family members, which is a pretty sweet deal, depending on how exactly it’s metered. And in a first, Apple will actually make the app available to Android. So basically, it works like most other services except unlike Spotify there is no free on-demand tier. You get access to radio with limited skipping with just an Apple account. With an Apple Music membership, you get the whole shebang.

More from TIME Magazine:

Only about about 15% of Spotify’s 60 million users pay for the service, but their subscription fees make up around 90% of the company’s revenue. That small but highly lucrative slice of Spotify users is exactly what Apple is after with Apple Music. After all, those users have already shown they’re willing to fork over 10 bucks a month for unlimited tunes. And there’s no penalty for switching: Spotify charges month-to-month with no cancellation fee, so users aren’t locked in to the service. This also explains why Apple’s rolling out an Android version of Apple Music — to go after more of Spotify’s user base. If Apple converts enough of Spotify’s paid users, it could totally decimate Spotify’s business. But the biggest advantage Apple Music will have is even simpler than all that: It will be automatically installed when iPhone users upgrade to iOS 8.4 later this month, while iPhones sold with that software on board will have the app pre-installed.

Here's the first ad for Apple Music.

Spotify To Ink $1B Deal With Universal

Spotify is expected to sign a $1B licensing agreement with Universal Music to cover streaming royalties over the next two years.

The $1 billion number — equal to the global revenue generated by all companies in the fast-growing streaming sector in 2013 — underscores the extent to which Spotify and other streaming services will drive digital revenue for the world’s biggest record company. Spotify’s payments to Universal, home to Taylor Swift, Nick Jonas and Madonna, are projected to account for 16 percent of the music giant’s recorded music revenue by March 2017 — up from 11 percent for the April 2015 to March 2016 period. In addition, Universal, which owns a stake in Spotify, will get 39 percent of its pretax earnings from Spotify by 2017, up from 28 percent over the next 12 months, according to the email, which factored in Spotify estimates for Universal’s growth.

Apple will launch its own $10/month streaming service in June. Unlike Spotify, their service will not offer advertiser-supported free streaming. Spotify boasts 60 million users worldwide, 15 million of whom pay for the ad-free version.

Taylor Swift - Blank Space

Last week Swift pulled her entire catalog off of Spotify at the same time that she became the only artist to score a platinum album in all of 2014, a feat that many industry observers noted as yet more grim evidence on the state of the music business. Anyway, here's today's follow-up to Shake It Off, the smash first single from her new album.

Taylor Swift Yanks Catalog From Spotify

Taylor Swift, the nation's top selling artist, yesterday pulled all of her music off Spotify in one of the biggest moves in the long-simmering war between musicians and streaming music services.

The decision means that a large number of fans will have only one option to hear Swift's new album, "1989," and that's to buy it, which hundreds of thousands of people have already done. Music's most influential artist is simultaneously making a political statement and a savvy business move. More than 700,000 people bought "1989" in the first two days it went on sale last week, according to Nielsen SoundScan. That already exceeds the year's biggest one-week seller, Coldplay's "Ghost Stories," which sold 383,000 in May. Music streaming services and file sharing have sharply cut into music sales for artists over the past couple of years. Many artists complain that the fees Spotify pays to record labels and music publishers, with a portion eventually funneled to musicians, is too small.

Spotify can't shake it off: "We were both young when we first saw you, but now there's more than 40 million of us who want you to stay, stay, stay. It's a love story, baby. Just say yes."

David Byrne Covers Biz Markie

Stereogum writer Tom Breihan explains:

Cake frontman John McCrea is one of the many artists railing against streaming services like Spotify and the way they only pay a pittance in royalties to artists. He’s put together a nonprofit called Content Creators Coalition, and last night, David Byrne headlined a CCC concert at New York’s Le Poisson Rouge; it also featured McRea, R.E.M.’s Mike Mills, Tift Merritt, and a few others. I have no idea how this led to Byrne doing an incredibly still and joyous cover of Biz Markie’s eternally wonderful atonal yawp “Just A Friend,” but that’s what happened.

The clip is going viral. I love this.

David Byrne On Web Streaming

"The larger question is that if free or cheap streaming becomes the way we consume all (recorded) music and indeed a huge percentage of other creative content – TV, movies, games, art, porn – then perhaps we might stop for a moment and consider the effect these services and this technology will have, before 'selling off' all our cultural assets the way the big record companies did. If, for instance, the future of the movie business comes to rely on the income from Netflix's $8-a-month-streaming-service as a way to fund all films and TV production, then things will change very quickly. As with music, that model doesn't seem sustainable if it becomes the dominant form of consumption. Musicians might, for now, challenge the major labels and get a fairer deal than 15% of a pittance, but it seems to me that the whole model is unsustainable as a means of supporting creative work of any kind. Not just music. The inevitable result would seem to be that the internet will suck the creative content out of the whole world until nothing is left." - David Byrne in a lengthy Guardian piece that examines (among other items) the meager royalties paid to artists by Spotify.

Spotify Sued Over User Playlists

Britain's Ministry Of Sound label has sued the music streaming service Spotify, claiming that user playlists that mirror the track listings on their compilations constitute a copyright violation.

Chief executive Lohan Presencer claims that his company has been asking Spotify to remove the playlists – some of which include "Ministry of Sound" in their titles – since 2012.  "It's been incredibly frustrating: we think it's been very clear what we're arguing, but there has been a brick wall from Spotify," said Presencer. A Spotify spokesperson confirmed to the Guardian that it had received the lawsuit, but declined to comment further. While Presencer is known to be no fan of Spotify according to industry sources, the lawsuit came as a surprise to the company. The Guardian understands that Spotify has held talks in the past with Ministry of Sound about licensing tracks from its label division, albeit without a deal being struck. The case will hinge on whether compilation albums qualify for copyright protection due to the selection and arrangement involved in putting them together. Spotify has the rights to stream all the tracks on the playlists in question, but the issue here is whether the compilation structure - the order of the songs - can be copyrighted.

Spotify currently has over 24 million users who have created over a billion playlists. (I've made a few dozen myself.)

Spotify's Most Popular Songs Of 2012

The streaming music service Spotify, to which I am woefully addicted, has posted their 100 most-played songs of 2012. Here's their Top Ten.

1. Gotye featuring Kimbra — "Somebody That I Used to Know"
2. Carly Rae Jepsen — "Call Me Maybe"
3. Fun. featuring Janelle Monáe — "We Are Young"
4. Flo Rida — "Whistle"
5. Flo Rida featuring Sia — "Wild Ones"
6. Train — "Drive By"
7. Nicki Minaj — "Starships"
8. Maroon 5 featuring Wiz Khalifa — "Payphone"
9. David Guetta featuring Sia — "Titanium"
10. Loreen — "Euphoria"

If you don't recognize #10, it was Sweden's winning entry at Eurovision 2012 and one of my own final picks to win. So there.  (Via After Elton)