Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple Says “We Hear You Taylor Swift”, Will Pay Musicians During Free Trial

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 152 posts

Re: Apple Says “We Hear You Taylor Swift”, Will Pay Musicians During Free Trial

#111

Post by Bud »

tptacek wrote: post #81
SchizoDuckie wrote: post #12

Musicians can complain when they want a bigger cut and it's fixed the next day. App developers and content producers get emailed 'we are taking more out of your cut' or 'if you don't want us to show ads near your content, reply to this email with "opt out"'

Don't app developers get a much bigger cut of revenues than musicians do? That being the case, I don't understand your comment.

I'm not sure of all the details, but the standard cut on the App Store is 70/30 and has been for years. So 70% to the developer.

The cut on Apple Music for musicians is reportedly going to be 71.5% of streaming revenue. Pretty similar.

Re: Apple Says “We Hear You Taylor Swift”, Will Pay Musicians During Free Trial

#112

Post by slackstation »

Has anyone actually read Taylor Swift's post? She praises Apple and basically says that this one small area, isn't great.

This isn't exactly a total take-down and I wouldn't be surprised if this was orchestrated. Even if it isn't. It's the kind of deep PR/Advertising that you rarely get the chance to pay for, let alone afford. And the cost of almost negligible in comparison. Even then, they have a "special" rate during those first three months.

Apple is a beast at making money.

Re: Apple Says “We Hear You Taylor Swift”, Will Pay Musicians During Free Trial

#113

Post by _nedR »

jusben1369 wrote: post #108
pinaceae wrote: post #42

this was a BRILLIANT pr orchestration. blogs, articles, etc all over the globe were written about apple music, for free. would have been far more expensive to buy all that airtime than this little scandal. so taylor swift gets more publicity, apple music is now an established brand name, everyone and their dog knows about their pricing model - holy shit. hats off to the apple team, playing the outrage-piano like no o…

The only brilliance in the PR here is the speed with which Apple moved to avoid looking like the richest company in the world screwing over struggling artists globally. Never going to win that one. I suspect Taylor had back channelled her displeasure and only went public when Apple took too long/didn't agree. So they had time to crunch the numbers and think it through and moved quickly once it hit the public arena.

What is sad here, is that in this case the "struggling artist" is Taylor Swift (more likely the record company she is associated with), and that was probably the only reason why Apple actually bothered to do anything about it. Based on Apple's treatment of developers I can imagine how Indie artist's concerns fare in Apple's consideration. Here is an article about this same issue which was raised by an indie artist a couple of days ago (http://www.macrumors.com/2015/06/19/apple-not-coercing-indie...)

But yes that is part of the brilliance of Apple PR.

Re: Apple Says “We Hear You Taylor Swift”, Will Pay Musicians During Free Trial

#114

Post by guelo »

pinaceae wrote: post #42

this was a BRILLIANT pr orchestration. blogs, articles, etc all over the globe were written about apple music, for free. would have been far more expensive to buy all that airtime than this little scandal. so taylor swift gets more publicity, apple music is now an established brand name, everyone and their dog knows about their pricing model - holy shit. hats off to the apple team, playing the outrage-piano like no o…

No has even heard of Google's streaming music service. Their marketing team is completely outclassed.

Re: Apple Says “We Hear You Taylor Swift”, Will Pay Musicians During Free Trial

#115

Post by pluckytree »

Although this is rumored, it seems highly plausible:

Had the contracts they signed with the labels included paying royalties, they would be giving away a product far below cost for 3 months. Spotify and friends could file a complaint that this is anti-competitive behavior. It could be argued that Apple used its financial power to lose money for three months to thwart real competition in the market.

Amazon was accused of doing this will digital books by selling them all below cost, although ironically Apple was the one that got in trouble.

What happens now is unclear. Can Apple argue they didn’t intend to be anti-competitive from the beginning or will people go after them anyways. I suspect the latter is guaranteed.

Re: Apple Says “We Hear You Taylor Swift”, Will Pay Musicians During Free Trial

#116

Post by mrdrozdov »

mhomde wrote: post #94
d_theorist wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you've missed the point a bit. The third (pretty likely) scenario that you don't mention is that they planned the whole exchange.

That seems highly unlikely, I have a hard time seeing this reflecting well upon Apple, more likely it will leave a sour taste in many people's mouth. It's not like Apple desperately needs the PR and why risk bad one?

I am not sure how either of you are defining highly likely or unlikely. Have you been in the shoes of the people making the decisions? Have you considered the varying inputs that define the statistical likelihood of the result? I recommend checking out http://rationality.org/workshops/ and perhaps reading http://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes

Re: Apple Says “We Hear You Taylor Swift”, Will Pay Musicians During Free Trial

#117

Post by donjh »

vbezhenar wrote: post #106

It's obvious that it was planned from the beginning. It's not possible to do such decisions "on the fly" for Apple monster. There are billions of dollars involved in such a decision. Well played, Apple, I must admit. What I wonder is how do they prevent me from regging new account every 3 monthes? Why would I pay them a single cent if I can spend few minutes once a 3 months and listen to their library for free?

It will be tightly coupled to your AppleID I'm sure. For everyday iOS users, the act of re-registering your device to a new AppleID would be too involved to be worth it. For users on other devices, though, I'm not sure what Apple could do to prevent this.

Re: Apple Says “We Hear You Taylor Swift”, Will Pay Musicians During Free Trial

#118

Post by _nedR »

doppp wrote: post #58
pinaceae wrote: post #42

this was a BRILLIANT pr orchestration. blogs, articles, etc all over the globe were written about apple music, for free. would have been far more expensive to buy all that airtime than this little scandal. so taylor swift gets more publicity, apple music is now an established brand name, everyone and their dog knows about their pricing model - holy shit. hats off to the apple team, playing the outrage-piano like no o…

This. It's highly unlikely that some SVP would respond so swiftly (no pun intended) to a pop star.

I am pretty sure that the SVP was on a conference call with a dozen Record company SVPs, one of whom said "You wanna go nuclear on this! There you go, We sent a tweet through Taylor's account"

edit : typos

Re: Apple Says “We Hear You Taylor Swift”, Will Pay Musicians During Free Trial

#119

Post by delecti »

_nedR wrote: post #113
jusben1369 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only brilliance in the PR here is the speed with which Apple moved to avoid looking like the richest company in the world screwing over struggling artists globally. Never going to win that one. I suspect Taylor had back channelled her displeasure and only went public when Apple took too long/didn't agree. So they had time to crunch the numbers and think it through and moved quickly once it hit the public arena.

What is sad here, is that in this case the "struggling artist" is Taylor Swift (more likely the record company she is associated with), and that was probably the only reason why Apple actually bothered to do anything about it. Based on Apple's treatment of developers I can imagine how Indie artist's concerns fare in Apple's consideration. Here is an article about this same issue which was raised by an indie artist a…

Part of the point of her letter was that she wasn't a struggling artist, but instead was putting her foot down in the name of the actual struggling artists who couldn't afford to stand up to a giant like Apple.

I suspect you haven't read Taylor Swift's letter, and I suggest you do. It's fairly short.

Re: Apple Says “We Hear You Taylor Swift”, Will Pay Musicians During Free Trial

#120

Post by dhagz »

JonFish85 wrote: post #103
pinaceae wrote: post #42

this was a BRILLIANT pr orchestration. blogs, articles, etc all over the globe were written about apple music, for free. would have been far more expensive to buy all that airtime than this little scandal. so taylor swift gets more publicity, apple music is now an established brand name, everyone and their dog knows about their pricing model - holy shit. hats off to the apple team, playing the outrage-piano like no o…

While I don't know how orchestrated this might have been, it's interesting that Apple seemed to cave to Taylor Swift's letter immediately, whereas Spotify basically told her that she's welcome back whenever she changes her mind. Apple had to know that Taylor Swift would be pretty on top of this, since she had already made her feelings known about the lack of compensation for streaming music (when she pulled her songs…

Well it works out for Apple, they now look like the company that will fight to keep one of the most popular artists on their platform, and in turn work to make the best deal possible for independent musicians. Never mind if they actually care, it's all about appearances.
Post reply on HN