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.

NIN Frontman Trent Reznor Is Helping Shape Apple's Coming Music Service

Oscar, Grammy, and Golden Globe-winning musician Trent Reznor is helping Apple with the launch of their streaming music service.

The new music app, which is a collaborative effort between Mr. Reznor and other Apple and Beats employees, including Jimmy Iovine — who founded Beats with the hip-hop star Dr. Dre — will feature the streaming music service with many of the same characteristics as the Beats Music streaming service, one Apple employee said. Those may include curated playlists and a more vivid visual appeal, while conforming to Apple’s sleek and minimal design aesthetic, one person said. The name Beats Music will most likely be shed. According to an Apple employee, the service is being tested as part of a new version of the company’s mobile software system, iOS, which has been given the code name “Copper” and is expected for public release this year.

The service is expected to launch at $10/month and will not include an ad-supported free option like Spotify.

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.

Jury Orders Robin Thicke & Pharrell Williams To Pay $7.4M To Gaye Family

Via the Los Angeles Times:

A federal jury found Tuesday that the 2013 hit song "Blurred Lines" infringed on the Marvin Gaye chart-topper "Got to Give It Up," awarding nearly $7.4 million to Gaye's children. Jurors found against singer-songwriters Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke, but held harmless the record company and rapper T.I. The verdict capped a trial that lasted more than a week and focused on the similarities between the song and the legendary soul singer's 1977 hit. The jurors began deliberating Thursday afternoon. An attorney for the Gaye children, Richard Busch, said there were copied elements -- including the bass and keyboard line, the hook and a repeated theme -- in all but two bars of "Blurred Lines." Busch also repeatedly pointed to statements made by the credited writers of the song -- Thicke and Williams -- referencing the late Motown legend in interviews about their writing process. Thicke said in several interviews that he suggested to Williams that they write something like "Got to Give It Up," and Williams has said he was "trying to pretend" he was Gaye when he wrote it. Thicke, Williams and their attorneys brushed off the statements as casual remarks designed to sell a song -- and in Thicke's case, made under the influence while he was drunk and high.

Jurors were told that Blurred Lines earned more than $5M for both Thicke and Williams, $6M for the record company, and $8M for its publishers. Such details are rarely disclosed to the public. The single and its album reportedly cost $7M to record and market. Some industry observers believe that today's verdict will stifle the creative process of other musicians.

Trial Concludes In Gaye Estate Vs Thicke

The children of the late Marvin Gaye are suing Robin Thicke for the profits of Blurred Lines, which has sold 15 million copies, earning $5M each for Thicke and its songwriter Pharrell Williams, who testified yesterday as the trial ended.

Williams said after the song was released, he saw similarities between "Blurred Lines" and Gaye's work but said that wasn't a conscious part of his creative process. Richard S. Busch, who represents the Gaye family, asked Williams whether he felt "Blurred Lines" captured the feel of the era in which Gaye recorded. "Feel," Williams responded. "Not infringed." The case opened last week and featured testimony from Thicke, who told jurors that he took a songwriting credit on "Blurred Lines" despite Pharrell doing most of the work. Thicke brought a bit of showmanship to a trial that has focused on minute details of chords and sheet music. He performed elements of "Blurred Lines" and hits by U2 and The Beatles to show how different songs can include similar-sounding musical elements. Williams did not perform any music during his more than hour of testimony, and complained that audio comparisons of "Blurred Lines" and "Got to Give It Up" had been created in a way that made them sound similar.

Criticized by some as an endorsement of sexual assault, Blurred Lines topped the charts in dozens of countries and spent twelve weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100, making it the biggest hit of 2013. Gaye's single topped the pop, R&B, and disco charts in 1977.

Tom Petty: No Lawsuit, No Hard Feelings

"About the Sam Smith thing. Let me say I have never had any hard feelings toward Sam. All my years of songwriting have shown me these things can happen. Most times you catch it before it gets out the studio door but in this case it got by. Sam’s people were very understanding of our predicament and we easily came to an agreement. The word lawsuit was never even said and was never my intention. And no more was to be said about it. How it got out to the press is beyond Sam or myself. Sam did the right thing and I have thought no more about this. A musical accident, no more no less. In these times we live in this is hardly news. I wish Sam all the best for his ongoing career. Peace and love to all." - Tom Petty, swatting down rumors that he'd been forced to sue gay crooner Sam Smith for the song-writing royalties to his Grammy-nominated single Stay With Me.

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.

Venue Builds 400-Foot Vinyl Copy Of The Eagle's Hotel California (And It Rotates)

Stereogum recaps:

The record now sits atop the roof of the Forum in Inglewood, CA, and measures 407 feet in diameter — or maybe it’s more appropriate to simply call it a 4884-inch. It was installed in anticipation of the six Eagles shows to mark the re-opening of the Forum since its purchase and renovation by the Madison Square Garden Company. The record took 10 days and roughly 75 workers to construct, and it actually rotates.

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.

Apple Announces iTunes Radio

At today's developers' conference Apple announced the launch of iTunes Radio, a streaming service that will compete with Pandora and Spotify.  Via Gizmodo:

Apple has finally announced its online streaming and music discovery service. This is how millions of people will listen to music from now on. What we're looking at here is a Pandora-like radio service that's built directly into the iTunes Music app. It's built into iOS 7, works on iPhone and iPad and iPod Touch. It's even built into iTunes on your Mac and Apple TV. It's free with advertisements, or you can get it for free if you're an iTunes Match subscriber.

It's National Record Store Day

Even though the days of Tower, Virgin, and many other national chains are long in the rear view mirror, there are still many independent record shops around the nation.  Hit the link for a guide to the stores participating in today's event.

Pet Shop Boys Leave EMI After 28 Years

After spending their entire career with EMI's Parlophone Records, the Pet Shop Boys have jumped ship and this June will release a new album with the relatively unknown Kobalt Label Services.

“This is a very exciting point in our careers," said Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe in a statement. “We are hugely proud of the new album and are very pleased to be working in conjunction with Kobalt. We’d like to thank everyone we’ve worked with at Parlophone over the last 28 years both in the UK and abroad. When we signed to the label in 1985 we had no idea how long and successful a relationship we were embarking on. However it is also exciting now to commence a new phase working with a new team in a new business structure and we look forward to a creative and equally fulfilling relationship with Kobalt.”

With Parlophone, the Pet Shop Boys scored four UK #1 singles and 42 UK Top 30 hits. Kobalt allows its artists to own their own masters, which is probably what the change is really about. Below is a teaser snippet of the coming album.

Billboard Magazine Rejiggers Pop Charts

Last week Billboard Magazine altered the methodology of tabulating its pop charts, making a radical change not seen since they began including digital downloads as a ranking criteria.

YouTube streaming data is now factored into the Hot 100 (and other genre charts), enhancing a mix of data that includes digital download track sales (and physical singles sales), as tracked by Nielsen SoundScan, as well as terrestrial radio airplay, on-demand audio streaming, and online radio streaming, as tracked by Nielsen BDS.

And that, at least in part, is why Harlem Shake is #1 this week.  The change also possibly knocked gay-friendly Macklemore's Thrift Shop from the top spot after a four-week run.

Clive Davis Comes Out As Bisexual

Music industry legend Clive Davis, the man credited with Whitney Houston's career (and the careers of many others), has come out as bisexual in a new memoir titled The Soundtrack Of My Life.

Davis, who is twice divorced, remains close to his family, which includes three sons, a daughter and six grandchildren, and to friends, with whom he vacations regularly. Soundtrack's aforementioned personal revelation acknowledges "something that my children and close friends have always known, but that I knew I would need to discuss in a biography": He considers himself bisexual. "After my second marriage failed, I met a man who was also grounded in music. Having only had loving relationships and sexual intimacy with women, I opened myself up to the possibility that I could have that with a male, and found that I could." Davis is currently involved with another man (who isn't in show business), "but I never stopped being attracted to women. Bisexuality is misunderstood; the adage is that you're either straight or gay or lying, but that's not my experience. To call me anything other than bisexual would be inaccurate."

Davis has earned multiple Grammy awards and was inducted as a non-performer into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame.

Britain's Last Music Retailer Goes Bankrupt

Billboard reports that Britain's last national music retailer has declared bankruptcy.

Ailing music and entertainment retailer HMV is to suspend the trading of its shares and enter administration, the U.K. equivalent of Chapter 11 bank protection, the company has confirmed. The troubled music company is the U.K.'s last major high street music retailer and has over 230 brick and mortar HMV stores in the United Kingdom and Ireland along with 9 Fopp outlets. It also has a 50% holding in U.K. digital retailer 7digital, which powers its own digital offering HMV.com.

HMV closed its  U.S. outlets a few years ago. The chain had several large stores in Manhattan.

YouTube Strips Billions Of Fake Views From Music Industry Channels

YouTube has stripped billions of fake views from the channels of several of the world's largest music industry companies.  The views were reportedly purchased from companies that use automated programs to artificially inflate the counts.

Google slashed the cumulative view counts on YouTube channels belonging to Universal Music Group, Sony/BMG, and RCA Records by more than 2 billion views Tuesday, a drastic winter cleanup that may be aimed at shutting down black hat view count-building techniques employed by a community of rogue view count manipulators on the video-sharing site.  Universal's channel is the one that took the biggest hit. According to figures compiled by the YouTube statistics analysts at SocialBlade, the record company's YouTube channel lost more than 1 billion views from its preexisting tally of 7 billion views Tuesday. Sony/BMG was the second largest sufferer, dropping more than 850 million views in one day, bringing its total number of views to a mere 2.3 million. RCA, which got off scot free by comparison, dipped 159 million views. Its tally now sits more modestly at 120 million views.

RELATED: Last week the video for Gangnam Style broke YouTube's all-time record with over one billion views.  The view count for that clip does not appear to have been affected by YouTube's action.

TRAILER: Inventing David Geffen

It airs tonight on PBS at 8PM. The New York Times has a review.  An excerpt:

Mr. Geffen’s story starts on a classic Hollywood arc: Brooklyn Jewish boyhood, apprenticeship in the William Morris mailroom, quick success as an artist’s manager and record company executive. But then it refuses to follow the usual rise-and-fall trajectory — it just keeps rising, to movie mogul, billionaire and most powerful man in show business. Ms. Lacy’s two-hour film acknowledges the well-documented ruthlessness and volatility — accompanied by shrewdness, drive and, for the lucky, intense loyalty — that fueled Mr. Geffen’s achievements. They’re framed as positive qualities, though some people shake their heads as they say it, and some of his more famous antagonists, like the agent Michael Ovitz, don’t appear. Less flattering examples of hubris, like his long battle against public beach access next to his house in Malibu, or his taste for gargantuan yachts, are not mentioned.

The CD Turns 30

NPR Music takes note:

Today marks the 30th anniversary of a musical format many of us grew up with: the compact disc. It's been three decades since the first CD went on sale in Japan. The shiny discs came to dominate music industry sales, but their popularity has faded in the digital age they helped unleash. The CD is just the latest musical format to rise and fall in roughly the same 30-year cycle. Compact discs had been pressed before 1982, but the first CD to officially go on sale was Billy Joel's 52nd Street.

I haven't purchased or even played a CD in a very long time. How about you?