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To Apple, Love Taylor

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Re: To Apple, Love Taylor

#371

Post by icebraining »

nona wrote: post #234
WorldWideWayne wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was hoping someone would start a popular kickstarter style site for this. It seems pretty simple to me. If you want your laws changed, pool your money and go lobby the gov't just like every other corporation.

Yeah! None of this one-man-one-vote crap, back to some good old fashioned plutocracy. After all if the top 10-20% own 90% of the wealth, it's only right and proper that they also own an equivalent share of the political power. ;-)

Nobody said it was right, just that it's less bad than having just the rich lobbying.

Re: To Apple, Love Taylor

#372

Post by reagency »

rsync wrote: post #126
nrp wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per the RIAA, the entire recorded music industry in the US recorded under $7 Billion in revenue in 2014. Apple has north of $20 Billion in cash in the US. There are likely many reasons for Apple to make the move they did, but it is unlikely cash on hand was one of them.

"Per the RIAA, the entire recorded music industry in the US recorded under $7 Billion in revenue in 2014." Amazing. We think of the RIAA, or "big music" as some kind of juggernaut force in society and politics - especially Internet politics. But their entire industry top line is smaller than what fedex makes in a month .[1] [1] http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/fdx/revenue-eps

You can't compare top-line revenue across industries. Fedex is capital intensive.

Re: To Apple, Love Taylor

#373

Post by mike_hearn »

icebraining wrote: post #360
biggy3100 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Culture has shifted and now piracy is not looked at as a real crime, but a passage of rite. These streaming services came around as an alternative to piracy and not paying anything for content anywhere. We're witness the bankrupting of artists over time. And it amazes me that on a forum of content creators, you can see the self-interested individuals rationalizing it as fair. We can argue about the business models al…

Piracy was never look at as a real crime. The "Home Taping Is Killing Music" campaign wouldn't have been launched if piracy was generally equated with a crime in society. To me the end result would be simple: The average user would have to pay more for their content People aren't exactly burning the money they would have otherwise spend on such content; they aren't going to stop paying their rent because they have le…

Of course "not paying for things" is an option. Nobody has a human right to Taylor Swift's music. If you can't buy it then just go listen to the radio, or use Spotify's ad supported service, or do something else.

I pay for all the movies I watch via iTunes. I never pirate movies. Most of the music I listen to is internet radio (i.e. it is free but with the artists permission). Some of my friends consider me odd, and watch more movies than I do, but that's OK.

Re: To Apple, Love Taylor

#374

Post by cowsandmilk »

nemik wrote: post #30
sanswork wrote: post #20

3 months free to buy market share makes sense but I am amazed to hear that they are doing it by just not paying the content producers during those 3 months. I'd be doing the same thing in her place. Apple has the cash to run a loss leader on this.

From http://www.aboveavalon.com/notes/2015/6/13/apples-cash-dilem... it seems like Apple may not actually have the cash to do this, not in the USA at least and it would need to pay taxes on the cash it is holding outside the US to pay the majority US labels/producers/artists. Not that this excuses what they're trying to pull here or anything. By trying to weasel out of paying any US taxes, they can't spend their own…

That article discusses buybacks and dividends.

Buybacks and dividends are post-tax expenses.

Paying royalties is an expense that comes before taxes. If they bring $500MM over and pay it as royalties, they would pay no taxes on it.

Re: To Apple, Love Taylor

#375

Post by gress »

w4 wrote: post #346
gress wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain why that wouldn't be a great deal for app developers? I develop iOS apps, and I'd love it if apple moved to a pay for use model. I care about a world where the most useful apps are rewarded.

> Can you explain why that wouldn't be a great deal for app developers? I develop iOS apps, and I'd love it if apple moved to a pay for use model. While it may be the case that pay-per-use would be a great model for developers (though I'm highly dubious that this is the case for anyone that isn't making a trivial $0.99 app), that isn't the main thrust of my hypothetical. The problem with this scenario is the loss of…

Pay-per-use would be far better for developers making deep apps that people actually use regularly than those making trivial 99c apps that are discarded quickly. Currently, an app like Omnioutliner or Clear that improves a person's productivity over years and is used 100-1000x as much as a 99c joke app can only command a 10x higher price and is then impeded by people being reluctant to pay so much up front.

But... to address your main point - yes absolutely, I'd happily give up a quarter of revenue to move to such a scheme, where my recurring revenue would be much higher because my apps are actually used by people and have a lower barrier for new users. It would be a mutually beneficial chance for developers, apple, and consumers.

However - I do grant that developers are more likely to be able to finance this transition than musicians.

Since nobody is paying for the music during the trial, and the intended result is higher revenues for the artists (and for Apple, but notably proportionally more for the artists), it is flatly disingenuous for the artists to position Apple as getting all the benefit.

What if Apple offered the artists an advance covering the 3 months based on current iTunes revenues, and then recouped this over three years by taking a higher percentage for that period from the artists who opted for it? That would solve the problem of the 3 month gap.

Re: To Apple, Love Taylor

#376

Post by Tycho »

Obviously Apple can afford to pay money out to the recording artists and labels for the free trial if they wanted to, but I wonder if the decision not to is related to setting a precedent. Like if they were to compensate all the artists $X per day of availability then that would be a sort of legal benchmark that could come back to haunt them.

Re: To Apple, Love Taylor

#377

Post by aleem »

michaelcampbell wrote: post #321
ixtli wrote: post #226

In 215 comments no one that I could find has mentioned that, while well-intentioned, this post comes off as somewhat disingenuous because Apple does not deal directly with the artists. The entire (pretty well-written) thing doesn't mention _at all_ that the majority of musicians do not deal directly with distributors. Think about it: how are Apple/Google/Spotify/Amazon going to deal directly with 10 million individua…

> Apple is being shitty by not paying for something they're making money on How are they making money on the free trial, during the trial?

(1) subscriber acquisition and (2) neutralising the competition.

AOL for example printed and gave away for free, millions of CDs with free dialup access, spending as much as $35 on SAC (Subscriber Acquisition Cost) [1]:

    > How much did it cost AOL to distribute all those CDs back in the 1990s?
    >
    > Steve Case, co-founder and former chief executive officer and chairman of America Online:
    >
    > At that time I believe the average subscriber life was about 25 months and revenue was about $350 so we spent about $35 to acquire subscribers. As we were able to lower the cost of disks/trial/etc we were able to ramp up marketing. (Plus, we knew Microsoft was coming and it was never going to be easier or cheaper to get market share.) When we went public in 1992 we had less than 200,000 subscribers; a decade later the number was in the 25 million range. That helped drive our market capitalization up from $70 million at the time of the IPO to $150 billion when we decided to combine with Time Warner to accelerate our transition to broadband and diversify our revenue mix.

    [1]: http://www.quora.com/How-much-did-it-cost-AOL-to-distribute-all-those-CDs-back-in-the-1990s

Re: To Apple, Love Taylor

#378

Post by w4 »

rayiner wrote: post #369
w4 wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Software developers aren't immune to piracy's effects, either. Whether we like it or not, we're quickly shifting into a world where art is only viable as a labor of love. Everything being digital means copying is free. Isn't this one of the big reasons for the rise of SaaS apps, though? Developers, unlike musicians, have found a way to combat piracy in a way that both consumers seem to prefer (lower upfront costs a…

Do consumers prefer SaaS? The reaction to Windows and Office becoming subscription software seems pretty uniformly negative.

Even if users grouse about it, they seem to prefer it versus a big one time upfront purchase based on their usage/purchase patterns. Of course, what they'd probably really prefer is a low one time upfront purchase, but that's typically not tenable for the software business.

Re: To Apple, Love Taylor

#379

Post by stefantalpalaru »

> it is unfair to ask anyone to work for nothing

Does she really think that she works for every digital copy of a recording? Or that there is a relation between the work needed to produce a recording and the number of copies she sells?

Re: To Apple, Love Taylor

#380

Post by jbooth »

simonh wrote: post #256
nemik wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From http://www.aboveavalon.com/notes/2015/6/13/apples-cash-dilem... it seems like Apple may not actually have the cash to do this, not in the USA at least and it would need to pay taxes on the cash it is holding outside the US to pay the majority US labels/producers/artists. Not that this excuses what they're trying to pull here or anything. By trying to weasel out of paying any US taxes, they can't spend their own…

> By trying to weasel out of paying any US taxes, they can't spend their own money. It's not about avoiding paying any US taxes, it's about avoiding paying US taxes on earnings abroad. This is why so many Americans living abroad are giving up their US citizenship. I'm a Brit living in London and I know several American born friends that have become British citizens to avoid paying both UK and US taxes on their earnin…

"It's not about avoiding paying any US taxes, it's about avoiding paying US taxes on earnings abroad."

It's also about structuring earnings so that they happen to be earned abroad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement

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