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To Apple, Love Taylor

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Re: To Apple, Love Taylor

#451

Post by w4 »

busterarm wrote: post #450
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…

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…

> 4 albums a year

And that would be an incredibly productive artist. Most artists release something like 1 album every 1-2 years, at best.

Re: To Apple, Love Taylor

#452

Post by tacone »

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…

Actually, it reminds a bit of Amazon, who used to promote Android apps giving them free for a day (at the expense of the opting-in developers of course):

http://readwrite.com/2011/08/02/amazons_growing_appstore_pro...

Re: To Apple, Love Taylor

#453

Post by gress »

logician76 wrote: post #419
gress wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By your logic, Apple should pay for the music and give it away free since they are the ones who will benefit. But that means that if revenues rise as a result of the new service, Apple should keep all the extra profit rather than sharing it with the artists. Is that what you really want?

Apple wants to give it away for free, not the artists. Apple needs the artists, hence they need to pay. Revenue rising with the new service will eat into the other revenue streams from sales. Subscription revenue has already been proven to be laughable with Spotify. Saying that Apple gets to keep all the extra profit because they paid the artists during arbitrary terms set by Apple is incredibly short sighted, as the…

This is simply false. Apple's deal shares more revenue with the artists than any other service. Therefore if users adopt Apple Music, the artists will get more in aggregate.

http://recode.net/2015/06/15/heres-what-happens-to-your-10-a...

My point is not that I believe that Apple should keep the excess profit. It's that if Apple's service increases the overalls profit for the artists it's reasonable that they should share in the costs of marketing. Otherwise the artists are double dipping.

Re: To Apple, Love Taylor

#454

Post by tajen »

naveenspark wrote: post #312

Taylor Swift is signed to Big Machine Records (BMLG). Big Machine Records is distributed by Universal Music Group (UMG). I am sure BMLG/UMG received a sizable advance from Apple in exchange for streaming rights for their master recordings. UMG probably negotiated an even higher advance in exchange for permission to launch the 3 month free campaign. UMG / BMLG should be sharing this advance payment with their artists.…

And why do we not hear about the other huge artists? (rhetorical question)

Re: To Apple, Love Taylor

#455

Post by gress »

nmesse wrote: post #430
gress wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I disagree. The truth is, some of my most used apps are the least important and/or cheapest. This is why, if we went with a pay by usage app store plan, the true winners would be the addictive, least useful apps. I use the Spotify app 24/7, yet I use Editorial and Pythonista (both costing around $7), an app I value to a much greater degree, sometimes just -8h daily. And the truth is, while OmniOutliner is so much use…

Sure but that's easily fixed by stipulating that ad supported services are not eligible for the payout.

Re: To Apple, Love Taylor

#456

Post by busterarm »

w4 wrote: post #451
busterarm wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 4 albums a year And that would be an incredibly productive artist. Most artists release something like 1 album every 1-2 years, at best.

Maybe in genres of music that you're accustomed to. There are a few where high output is the norm. The output of a lot of producers and (especially) ghost-writers is pretty hard to fathom. I have a great story about Japanese record labels that's pretty long for here though.

Many well-known artists have released multiple hit records in the same year before though and many more are releasing their own albums and producing other peoples. In the early 60s popular artists sometimes put out two hit records a year (Bob Dylan, The Beatles '63-'65)...Led Zeppelin did that once in '68. David Bowie put out two hit records AND co-wrote and produced two Iggy Pop records in '77. CCR put out three LPs one year...

It happens a lot more than you realize.

Re: To Apple, Love Taylor

#457

Post by busterarm »

busterarm wrote: post #450
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…

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…

As another separate point that I'd like here but isn't part of this comment.

I think that all transactions _inevitably_ break down when (at least) one party has no skin in the game or when they misestimate their or the counter-party's stake. (Call it the busterarm theory of economics).

The only possible skin in the game that Apple has here is their brand. Their offering here is basically a value statement that Apple's brand and what it brings is worth more than artists will be losing in streaming dollars.

I think Apple is significantly misestimating both their risk and their counter-party risk here. _And_ the risk to their brand is effectively zero. It'll be interesting to see what happens. My impression of their music offerings was that their real value was the trust they had with both artists and consumes; they probably don't see it being that way.

One cannot operate a paid media streaming music while simultaneously proposing that the value of that media is zero. There's that old business maximum that if you want to know what a company cares about, look what they spend their money on.

Re: To Apple, Love Taylor

#458

Post by bluthru »

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…

>I think anyone can agree that Apple is being shitty by not paying for something they're making money on

Apple AND the music industry are losing money during the 3 months, but they both stand to gain money after that. Apple has invested a lot of money in creating the service and running it for free for the trial period.

Re: To Apple, Love Taylor

#459

Post by Animats »

WalterBright wrote: post #439
byuu wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not making any statement on whether it's good or bad, right or wrong, but ... 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. Scarcity has gone out the window. Now if only our increased productivity and automations led to lesser and lesser worki…

On the other hand, historically, art hasn't paid very well. I suspect the modern artists-get-rich era started with Elvis. That era may be an aberration and be drawing to a close. In my own profession, writing compilers, you simply can't sell them anymore. That hasn't deterred me from continuing to do so, I just adapt and find other ways to make a living from the business.

" I suspect the modern artists-get-rich era started with Elvis."

A little further back than that, but not much further. Frank Sinatra, maybe. With radio and recordings, for the first time a musician could get revenue from people far away.

"In my own profession, writing compilers, you simply can't sell them anymore."

Compilers, operating systems, browsers... Maybe software as an industry only had a limited lifespan. In the early IBM mainframe era, machines were expensive, vendor-provided software was usually included, and there was not much of a third-party software industry. Now, software is very cheap, and ancillary to advertising or services.

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