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To Apple, Love Taylor

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Re: To Apple, Love Taylor

#441

Post by dagw »

ricardobeat wrote: post #138
ehosca wrote: post #51

does Taylor Swift herself have full autonomy over determining how/when her music can be played?

That is a great question that I'm also curious to hear the answer. She seems to be signed with Universal, how come does she have fine-grained control over her publishing rights unlike most other artists? Or are these actually moves by the labels using her to earn sympathy from the public?

She seems to be signed with Universal

No, she's signed with an indie label called Big Machine Records. Big Machine Records has a distribution deal with Universal.

Re: To Apple, Love Taylor

#442

Post by danmaz74 »

3 months free is a way for Apple to promote its service against its competitors, and they need to do this promotion because they're late-comers. There is nothing to gain for the creators of music in getting more people to use Apple streaming service instead of Spotify or Google, so, why should they finance Apple's promotion?

Re: To Apple, Love Taylor

#443

Post by macspoofing »

w4 wrote: post #186

For everyone suggesting that artists are simply being greedy or unreasonable in expecting Apple to pay them during the trial period, I'd encourage you to consider the hypothetical I posted in the last thread about Apple Music's 3 month trial. It might help contextualize the artists' and labels' complaints: > Tomorrow, Apple announces that it will be introducing an "App Store Subscription." For $9.99/month users will…

Steam allows full refunds within 2 weeks. You're not publishing on steam anymore?

If there was a subscription program for apps, I could see apple introducing a similar trial period.

Re: To Apple, Love Taylor

#444

Post by geofft »

latj wrote: post #418
buro9 wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you happen to be this Summer's big record... in which case your one profitable window for your track will have has just been obliterated.

Lets say you are that artist. You have practiced, trained, studied. You have worked hard and have a rare natural talent. You sang the songs and played guitar. Now you have "this summer's big record". Two million children want to listen to your song (without paying any additional costs) 50-100 times over the next 3 months, and then never again. How much is that worth to society? How much money should you make from tha…

That just seems to result in everyone getting underpaid. Keep paying musicians, let's just figure out how to pay teachers and bus drivers and everyone else more.

If we say that musicians should be paid less because our standard as society is that everyone else is underpaid and that's fine, that's really disrespectful to the productive workers for the world.

Re: To Apple, Love Taylor

#445

Post by sgk284 »

buro9 wrote: post #404
kstrauser wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd encourage you to consider the hypothetical I posted in the last thread about Apple Music's 3 month trial. To make the analogy a little more accurate: > Tomorrow, Apple announces that it will be introducing an "App Store Subscription." For $9.99/month users will be allowed to use one App Store app at a time. When an app is running, it will present a button allowing a user to purchase that app so that they may us…

Unless you happen to be this Summer's big record... in which case your one profitable window for your track will have has just been obliterated.

That assumes every Apple Music user is on their 3 month free trial at the same time. This 3 month trial won't even be a consideration in a year, as the majority of users will be past theirs. In reality, at any given moment a small percentage of users will be in the free trial period (excluding the first 3 months of the service being generally available).

Re: To Apple, Love Taylor

#446

Post by braythwayt »

kstrauser wrote: post #425
nosideeffects wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you completely missed the point. Using your own analogies of teachers, this would sort of be like a local government letting all the teachers know that they will be teaching kids without pay for the next 3 months. If this ever happened, any teachers that could would get the hell out of dodge.

It's really not like that at all. The teacher scenario has an opportunity cost: if they're busy teaching kids for free, then they're not available for teaching other kids for pay. In the Apple Music situation, there's likely very little opportunity cost unless we believe that it's going to be so amazingly and instantly successful that it will cannibalize all current revenue streams.

    In the Apple Music situation, there's likely very little opportunity cost unless we
    believe that it's going to be so amazingly and instantly successful that it will
    cannibalize all current revenue streams.
You or I may believe whatever we like, but I’ll bet big money that Apple believes that it will be amazingly and instantly successful and further that their entire business plan consists of cannibalizing all current revenue streams.

I don’t think they’d be in this business at all if they didn’t think they had a shot at rendering the competition irrelevant.

Re: To Apple, Love Taylor

#447

Post by eropple »

kstrauser wrote: post #401
sdenton4 wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but touring has a crazy pile of expenses associated, in addition to all the unfortunateness of being on the road for as long as you want to make money at it. http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2014/11/25/band-ju...

It's not that I'm unsympathetic to the artists, but I think that it's unrealistic that they'd expect otherwise. A career in tech has a crazy pile of expenses associated (Stanford isn't giving away comp sci degrees; continuing education unless you want to end up a one-trick pony), in additional to all the unfortunateness of having to live in a hyper-expensive tech hub for as long as you want to make money at it. Yeah,…

> A career in tech has a crazy pile of expenses associated (Stanford isn't giving away comp sci degrees

I would contend that for somebody who's already going to Be Good At This, that would be a crazy expense from a bad decision. The best three engineers I know have degrees from UMass-Lowell, UMaine, and the University of Delaware. (I'm not #2, but I went to UMaine and graduated with $20K in loans. Paid off in four years, and I slacked.)

As far as lower career ceilings--each of those people (and I) are at lead/staff-level positions in the Boston area and have not wanted for challenging or well-paying work, while having expenses less than half of your average San Francisco tech nerd. The specter of the Bay Area looms large, but I think it's silly in how all-consuming it's considered.

Re: To Apple, Love Taylor

#448

Post by kristianc »

madeofpalk wrote: post #105
kristianc wrote: post #94

Apple Music's big problem is that the service itself offers nothing new - most of the people that are going to paid for paid music will use Spotify already, and getting them to switch will be hard. I suspect that Apple knows that the take up for the three month free trial will be huge, but that conversion to paid will be a much harder row to hoe. This is all about Apple not wanting to foot the bill if and when people…

> Apple Music's big problem is that the service itself offers nothing new. Eh. Apple Music is mediocre and that's ok. It's instantly going to be the default music player on hundreds of millions of iPhones overnight. At worst, they're going to get the same usage as Spotify.

I'd suggest that most of the people that want to pay to stream music through their iPhones already use Spotify - the rest use YouTube and pay nothing.

Apple pushing the labels to nix Spotify's freemium tier was no accident. Mediocre service + paid + Apple brand = no longer good enough.

Re: To Apple, Love Taylor

#449

Post by kristianc »

RexRollman wrote: post #107
kristianc wrote: post #94

Apple Music's big problem is that the service itself offers nothing new - most of the people that are going to paid for paid music will use Spotify already, and getting them to switch will be hard. I suspect that Apple knows that the take up for the three month free trial will be huge, but that conversion to paid will be a much harder row to hoe. This is all about Apple not wanting to foot the bill if and when people…

None of the streaming services (including existing services Rdio and Spotify) offer anything unique. In my opinion, the only thing the truly separates them is catalogue size.

Spotify has a freemium tier that converts extraordinarily well.

Re: To Apple, Love Taylor

#450

Post by busterarm »

kstrauser wrote: post #391
w4 wrote: post #186

For everyone suggesting that artists are simply being greedy or unreasonable in expecting Apple to pay them during the trial period, I'd encourage you to consider the hypothetical I posted in the last thread about Apple Music's 3 month trial. It might help contextualize the artists' and labels' complaints: > Tomorrow, Apple announces that it will be introducing an "App Store Subscription." For $9.99/month users will…

> I'd encourage you to consider the hypothetical I posted in the last thread about Apple Music's 3 month trial. To make the analogy a little more accurate: > Tomorrow, Apple announces that it will be introducing an "App Store Subscription." For $9.99/month users will be allowed to use one App Store app at a time. When an app is running, it will present a button allowing a user to purchase that app so that they may us…

Exposure isn't necessarily good for an app.

Users frequently _cost_ money. Ask anyone who has significantly scaled freemium services.

Exposure to lots of users who might not use your service can kill your business.

If your service is really that good or serves a real need, you would recognize these potential users and market to them _aggressively_. You would even raise significant capital to do so if you did not have it. Seeing the value in your product, VCs would invest in you.

Even if your product has no inherent costs to provide as a service after it is made, you scale the money and time that invested in it based on your expected reach/profit and your profit model has just been thoroughly fked by Apple.

This definitely applies to people who produce music too because the product you're releasing has a profitable shelf-life (except for unicorns, really) and artists release on a schedule that their market (and they personally) can support.

You put a certain amount of money and time into an album based on how many people it will reach and the likelihood and timeframe before you can put out another one. Some artists release every few years, some every year and some release multiple albums per year.

If Apple is giving away your album for 3 months and you release 4 albums a year, they may be giving away 1/4 of your yearly income...(Think of it like Big O and worry about your worst-case performance.)

Using revenue streams that you don't control is hazardous. Relying on them is outright dangerous. Using revenue streams that you don't control AND marketing streams that you don't control? Suicide.

Note: this is not an argument for whether you should pay for music or not...that's a topic too hot for HN.

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