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To Apple, Love Taylor

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281–290 of 534 posts

Re: To Apple, Love Taylor

#281

Taylor et. al. don't seem to understand. Apple controls the marketplace and is a legal monopoly, owning the software AND hardware. If you don't like what Apple does, tough luck. Whining about it has never amounted to anything and nobody is going to replace them. Long live the King. [ now picture me killing myself by slitting my throat with an Air ]

Taylor doesn't seem to care at all - "[...] can support myself, my band, crew, and entire management team by playing live shows."

Re: To Apple, Love Taylor

#282
post #81
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…

Would they have to pay taxes all of the overseas earnings if they use just some of it? I figured they only paid tax on what they actually bring back here.

No, just what they repatriate. But they already have $22 BILLION in cash in the U.S., and they can borrow more for far less than their income tax rate, so why incur even a little tax?

Re: To Apple, Love Taylor

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like an amazing offer. who wouldn't want to trade a one time free or 99 cent payment for recurring revenue.

Well you have to split that $10/month with all the other apps that the user accessed that month(on average). So it's quite likely that your somewhat successful app wouldn't even reach the 99 cents anymore let alone 99 cents per user.

This is a pretty successful model in some countries: http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/15/kddi-smartpass/

Re: To Apple, Love Taylor

#285

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.

That exists: Mayday PAC. Lawrence Lessig organized it last year. They raised $11 million and tried to influence some key Congressional races, but it didn't really work. Now they're trying some different things: https://medium.com/@lessig/we-tried-we-learned-we-re-trying-...

Interesting link, but $11 million bucks is probably not enough to buy even a single Senator, even if his district is an extremely cheap media market.

A recent Senate campaign in one of the nation's cheapest media markets (Jon Tester's) was run for ~15 million bucks[0] in coordinated campaign funds, plus probably-larger undisclosed amounts of "independent" campaign funding through PAC's etc.

In the same cheap media market, Senator Max Baucus raised >$5 million[1] for the coordinated campaign in his final Senate race, in which he ran effectively unopposed. Again this $5 million does not account for his pre-existing war chest from thirty five years of Senate campaigns or the (vastly larger) fundraising of his GlacierPAC or other related "independent" political organizations.

So the minimum single-senator campaign cost is probably somewhere between those two bounds. Therefore I don't regard the core idea of Mayday PAC as a failure; instead it seems like they need to scale it before we can decide if it's workable.

[0] http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=n0002...

[1] http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=n0000...

Re: To Apple, Love Taylor

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most software engineers (employees) are paid for crafting their software, not for having crafted in the past. That's exactly what I advocate for. We absolutely should pay people for working! I'm saying that those who distribute should be compensated for the distribution, and those who craft should be compensated for the crafting. And everyone should be free to do either, to the best of their abilities.

This is not true at all. Many consultants may in fact be paid once. But most developers work at companies for a salary. That salary is paid for by charging for software over and over. Without being able to charge multiple times for the same piece of software, there would be no Microsoft, IBM, or Oracle, no SaaS, and no App Store, just to name a few, and none of the jobs that come along.

You're being deceptive, Fargren is on point. Once the dev leaves the company they no longer make that salary. Artists typically get paid some kind of royalty and don't give up full ownership of their work.

>Without being able to charge multiple times for the same piece of software, there would be no Microsoft, IBM, or Oracle, no SaaS, and no App Store

Good riddance.

Re: To Apple, Love Taylor

#287
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…

There are a lot of economic differences between music and apps (e.g. price range, labels negotiate on behalf of artists, music has dozens of outlets versus 2-3 for apps, etc), but my hope is you would still analyze the economics before ditching. If you ultimately would stand to make more money through subscriptions in the long term, despite losing three months of revenue, then it would make sense to stay, right?

Re: To Apple, Love Taylor

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like an amazing offer. who wouldn't want to trade a one time free or 99 cent payment for recurring revenue.

Of course, music works completely differently. I have many albums that I only listened to ten times or so. In the old model, they have still received a fair share of $10, in the new model, not so much. I can easily understand why artists want to opt out. I am also not sure about Apple's model for the distribution of subscription fees. But e.g. in Spotify's model, it is largely large acts benefitting from indies, rath…

That link perfectly describes my concern with subscription systems. If Apple distribute the royalties calculated per-user rather than based on (total royalties / total number of listens system wide) I'll move over from spotify, as it will reward the bands I like more than the current system.

I like that spotify pays royalties from free accounts, I dislike that I am effectively subsidizing this as a premium user. However, at the moment I am more comfortable with this than apples '3 months no royalties' system.

Another interesting point is that for a music subscription services, there is very little keeping users tied to one provider - all I need is the ability to export my playlists. I wonder if spotify's revenue will collapse for 3 months, but if they can be better than apple, they can get it all back 3 months later.

Re: To Apple, Love Taylor

#289
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…

Agree for different reasons.

I don't think they're being greedy, any more than I think users are being entitled when they wait for steep discounts on Steam games or refuse to pay .99 for an app someone worked really hard on.

Price trends towards marginal cost, and marginal cost for digital IP is zero. That's true if everyone on both sides is a group of angels, devils, spoiled brats, or automatons.

Re: To Apple, Love Taylor

#290
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…

Pay-per-usage of apps (similar to streaming music) might be really interesting. Of course, games already kind of do that via IAP and it absolutely sucks, so who knows.
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