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 use it any time they want, whether or not their phone is connected to the Internet, and concurrently with other apps. During the 3 month free trial, Apple will not pay royalties for streaming apps but will pay normal royalties for any apps purchased.
This would suck for the Omni Groups and Mojangs, but absolutely awesome for tiny shops who currently make almost nothing and would now have much greater exposure. Likewise Taylor Swift doesn't need more exposure to sell her music, but Joe Garage might actually pick up a few listeners and fans. You see this is a money grab. I see this is as a necessary (and label approved!) bootstrapping for long term gain.
And in the mean time, even major artists will continue to get their current revenue stream from radio stations, Spotify, iTMS, etc. unless we really believe that Apple Music is going to gain a 100% market share immediately. Long term, even that would probably be a huge benefit to artists because it's almost certainly a better deal than they're getting from anyone else today.
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.
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.
And that would be an incredibly productive artist. Most artists release something like 1 album every 1-2 years, at best.
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.
I really want to drive home the "you're going to work just as hard, but for less money" argument to get people thinking about it the right way.
It's no different than music piracy, which actually I don't care about, just don't be dishonest about doing it as a business.
> Exposure isn't necessarily good for an app. Users
> frequently _cost_ money. Ask anyone who has
> significantly scaled freemium services.
You can't just "be ready to host a 100 million users, tomorrow" in the early stages of your business.
If there are credible signs you will acquire 100m users tomorrow, and you can't walk in to a VC and walk out with a big chunk of money for a small amount of equity, it means you don't have a real business plan.
Additionally, I would be interested in any examples you have of companies acquiring 100m users overnight, or anything within two orders of magnitude of that.
http://blog.shiftyjelly.com/2011/08/02/amazon-app-store-rott...
> All we got was about 300 emails a day to answer over the space of a few weeks, that left us tired and burnt out. For all we know most of the people who wanted our application, now have it. To add insult to injury Pocket Casts relies on a server to parse podcast feeds (allowing instant updates on your phone), and all these new users forced us to buy more hardware just to meet demand. Hardware that we are going to have to support indefinitely at our own cost.
Can you fault Shift Jelly for not being able to see through this?
But part of your argument has merit: it's the same reason that "exposure" doesn't create album sales. There's no real chance (really, there isn't) that you have a product that will reach 100m people tomorrow, so you shouldn't be producing music as if you would.
> You can't plan for it.
> The corpses of businesses that scaled past their ability
> to serve their customers are real.
> Turns out that a Rails App + someone calling themselves a "Serial Startup CEO" on LinkedIn don't necessarily equate to a business.
Rails, like any other tool/framework, works perfectly well for certain kinds of problems. I would say this is very true for the kinds of businesses that most "serial startup CEOs" are solving. Twitter gave Rails a bad reputation because Twitter's problem was exceptionally bad for Rails at Twitter's scale. In most other cases it's just poor engineering discipline, whether it's in choice of tool or how it is used. It turns out that ActiveRecord isn't really a great tool for dealing with 450M+ write transactions per day. Wasn't designed to be.
Rails is powerful and ubiquitous for very good reasons. The tools that often get the most hate end up quietly doing their jobs or, worse, growing up and becoming better and everywhere. JavaScript, PHP, Lisp, C, Java? And that's just a few programming langauges...There's a holy war over Text Editors that aren't ever going away.
It's not a "web 2.0 startup" specific problem we're talking about. Rapid growth is notoriously one of _the most common_ reasons that companies fail (regardless of if that failure puts them out of business or not).
It only works if there is a high enough proportion of conversions to paid.
> It only works if there is a high enough proportion of
> conversions to paid.
How much is that worth to society? How much money should you make from that?
Consider an elementary teacher tasked with teaching 28 children to read and guiding them to becoming active participants in democracy rather than repeat offenders. $50k/yr. Compare a state university computer science professor who will teach dozens of new jacks this year how to measure and optimize algorithms-- setting them up for a life of full time employment while all their friends tread in the sea of shit and unemployment around them. $90k/yr. Consider a bus driver, a construction worker, a civil engineer, anyone who didnt have a chance to finish high school or College and still goes to work every day. Or those who went to ivy league colleges and resisted the urge to go into finance. Productive people.
We are all productive and we all add value, and we are underpaid. Our kids will have varying access to good education. We have less access to inferior healthcare. We spend too much time at work and not enough time with our kids. The lowest of us live in poverty and violence, relegated to feeding our children less healthy, life shortening diets. And thats just in the U.S., one of the wealthiest states on the planet.
Now how much is that song you sang worth?
Artists should be about art. If you dont like the fact that Apple wants you to be their slave, then distribute your music yourself. If people dont want to pay for your music, then keep doing what you want to do and starve or start doing what they want you to do and make money. But dont try to be about the art and say the faceless evil corporation should pay you more. It is disrespectful to the productive workers of the world.
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.
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.
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.
The reality is that most of the people you're talking about will "waste" their meagre salaries on trivial stuff like streaming music services and satellite TV. Taylor Swift didn't sell millions of albums to nobody.
Music is entertainment, and it makes people's crappy lives more enjoyable, and that's a pretty valuable service, which is why it can be so lucrative for some people.
Sure, you didn't write anything that was going to join the ranks of "The Art of Computer Programming," but surely you wouldn't be okay just giving up the hundred thousand dollars or so in royalties you could have made? Without artists writing hit summer songs, there would be no hit summer songs. Without people writing flavor-of-the-month technical books, we wouldn't have those either. You might scoff, but people should be paid for these things.
"If you dont like the fact that Apple wants you to be their slave, then distribute your music yourself." That's exactly what Taylor is doing. What's your point?
You should read KLF's The Manual. For purposes of achieving "this summer's big record", there's quite often not a lot of correlation with training, study, talent, etc.
Not saying that's always the case and in particular, it's very different with artists producing more than two or three top10 hits, over time, or producing more than one successful full album with good sales. It's that consistency and prolonged creativity that really requires the talent and training. For the #1 big summer hit, it often suffices to just be lucky, hitting the right gimmick and vibe at the right time, just like a video or meme going viral.
Most artists aren't successful (if even) for more than a few years at best. The lifespan of their albums even less so.
(Some old data: http://frumin.net/ation/2008/05/climb_the_charts_schmimb_the... )
Okay, it might matter when it happens: It might be really catastrophic to release your album right when the service starts (actually it sounds like Ms. Swift is pretty smart now, eh?). Though then you might want to hold off for a whole year entirely. Hold on now, why is Apple dictating the release schedule of my albums? I thought they weren't a record label...
...oh wait.
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 working hours, we'd all have a lot more time for artistic endeavors on the side.
But yes, it's becoming increasingly difficult to sustain yourself solely as an artist. Life isn't fair, unfortunately.
Would the world be better if we had purely gratis art? I don't know ... the production values would certainly be a lot lower. But maybe people doing things solely because they enjoy it, rather than for the paycheck, would result in more passion and creativity; and less cash grabs. Or maybe everything would be awful.
Either way, it seems futile to rail against something none of us can possibly change, and wish for the good old days of $15 CDs with one good song on it, or $200 OS installation CDs, or $800 paint programs.
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 and usage based pricing) and developers benefit from (more revenue over time in exchange for delivering real value).
Besides, being forced to provide 3 months of free usage without any say in the matter is hardly defensible due to piracy. It's even less defensible when the party enforcing the free usage is the party that stands to benefit most from it.
For two examples:
I've actually been pretty pleased with Lightroom/Photoshop as SaaS because these apps still often have new innovations that actually make my life easier as a hobbyist photographer. Thus I don't mind paying per month because I'd probably already be upgrading to the new version every year anyway and this is just spreading a similar cost out over time.
OTOH, Office's switch to SaaS is what finally pushed me over the edge to using free ("as in beer") alternatives... they can keep rejiggering the UI this way and that way but I can't imagine what they would add to Word or Excel that would make them seriously more useful to me, it was never a must-upgrade for me (YMMV if you work in an enterprise office setting or whatever) and thus the SaaS move is not good for my usage.
Compared with Office 365, you don't get the free 1TB of cloud storage, the 50GB mailbox, the full online versions of Office, the ability to stream Office programs without installing them (so you can use them on, say, a cybercafe PC), the add-ons and extensions, the cross-platform tablet and smartphone apps, the free upgrade to the next version of Office, and so on.
Office 365 is a huge ecosystem play, whereas OO/LO have no ecosystems.
Otherwise, UI changes are annoying, but the basic Office UI hasn't really changed since 2007. It changes less often than, say, Gmail.
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.
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.
Internet downloading removed all the friction, and prices went to zero.
However, there's still plenty of opportunity doing service, maintenance, custom work, training, etc.
The "build it and they will come" is a stupid Hollywood fantasy. Even the Beatles went nowhere until they hooked up with promoter George Martin.
So incredibly true.
And even whenever I do try and talk about my software, people usually perceive it as an attack on competing software (you can't say why someone should use your product without implicitly stating why they shouldn't use someone else's); or as shameless self-promotion and advertising (even though it's all FOSS) =(
The number of ways to sustain yourself has significant increased in recent times, and some of those don't even use copyright as a mean for revenue. They are by nature immune to piracy.
Taken Patreon and kickstarter. You can not pirate art which has not been created. An artist can decide how much wages they demand rather than find an other job, which incidental is how the job market works. If they agree to a certain amount, they get paid and do the work agreed on. Everyone walks away happy, the artist got paid, and art is created.
What is getting harder to do is getting repeatable paid for work you done in the past. Most programmers do work for hire, and they survive quite well on not being paid for every copy of work they once made. So long there is a strong interest for new work to be created, old work will be what validate the artist current pay.
I know a web comic that update twice a month and the author current gets paid $5k a month to do so. No copyright is involved, no police and no SOPA. Just an artist and their fans, enabled to be sustained by the basic model of people wanting more art to be created and a way for that to happen. When we describe the future as "people doing things solely because they enjoy it" we limit the market available to artist to how it was done in the past, and it seems artist themselves are instead choosing to find new ways rather than to close up shops.
But so has the offer; anyone with a computer can create and publish music nowadays, which is both good and bad; good for the creative industry, bad for income for said creative industry because only a small percentage will ever see money. Same with the webcomics you noted; all you need is a computer with the worst drawing software to recreate something like XKCD. Everyone can do what they want / enjoy, but only a very, very small percentage of those will be able to sustain themselves off it - especially, or mostly, in the creative industry.
If any file hosting service can get shut down for piracy, Apple should be held accountable to the same laws.
Telling artists to work for free while they benefit sounds a lot like asking someone to work on spec, to which I respond: Fuck You, Pay Me (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U)
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 all day long, but it should be in tandem with the fact that life isn't fair, and what's happening to these artists isn't fair. The way people are talking about it, it doesn't really come off that way.
Sometimes I wonder if SOPA would have gone through and achieved the purposes it was set out to do - yes, let's be ideological for a moment and talk about the purpose vs the potential abuse. A lot of websites that harbor piracy are no now no longer available, and it's way more difficult to pirate your favorite music. What would that world be like, for consumers and artists?
Maybe more artists would pull their music from the streaming services, which were formed to fight piracy. Now all of a sudden that 9.95 per month you pay for music isn't so great, because not everyone is on there. The streaming services were built as an alternative to a crime - piracy.
To me the end result would be simple: The average user would have to pay more for their content, and that money would flow more into artists pockets, and those who work in artistic industries, which would reinforce more and better artistic creation.
I am probably one of the few: I pay for all of my content, and not on streaming services. I don't buy singles, I buy the whole album. When a friend opens a business, I don't immediately ask for a deal. I go in, and pay full price, and try to support that friend as best as I can. I may be old school - I pay for things, I am happy to pay for things. I want to financially support people who create things, because I want more people to have a means to be able to go out, create, and be rewarded for their work.
Unless you're paying them directly, you're still not paying the artist. Streaming and piracy don't even come close to the drain that labels put on income flow to artists. Artists made just about $23.40 for every $1000 their songs sold for in 2010, according to TechDirt [2].
I wish the world were as you described. But it's not. SOPA came close to destroying free speech online instead of guaranteeing artists their fair share.
[1]: http://www.bradsucks.net/archives/2007/05/22/where-your-musi... (an indie/marketplace artist's view)
[2]: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100712/23482610186.shtml (standard industry view)
For Taylor Swift, sure. But there is an increasing number of musicians owning their own recording equipment and producing pro-level recordings out of their home (just like starting a software business out of your home is increasingly common).
For these people, they put up the capital. While I won't condone piracy of any copyrighted works at all, it's not reasonable to assume that all musical artists are impacted by copyright infringement in the same way.
Home producers may well be absolutely thrilled to make a few thousand dollars in sales a year, in order to continue funding their own work. Why take that away from them through piracy?
[There's also the argument that small act home producers should be thrilled to get the exposure even if nobody is paying for their recordings. As a home producer myself, I find a small amount of comfort in that, but professional-level recording and music equipment isn't cheap... I'll fund it with other income as needed, but I'd rather have my music outfit be self-sustaining.]
I'll do whatever I can to support content creators.
Does that make it OK for artists to get 2.34% of what listeners pay for the music they make? Or does it make TechDirt's figures wrong? If so, how?
> Or were you not paying for anything already, and then came across that info which now justified your position?
I am not striking, but I agree with everything s/he wrote. And, as it happens, I do pay for all the music and video and software I acquire. So it is simply not true that holding the opinions s/he expressed is always a rationalization for not liking to pay for things.
(And: do you actually have any evidence that striking pirates things rather than paying for them? Or do you just assume that anyone who takes a position opposing yours must be a pirate?)
TPP/TTIP/RECP leaks suggest the criminalization of non-commercial copyright infringement, where prosecution will be possible even if the copyright holder does not want to prosecute, e.g. fanzines.
Can we develop a payment mechanism which moves funds from audience to artist for virtual goods, with no exchange of music (which can be obtained on any channel), but which provides a non-forgeable "protection from being prosecuted"? This would return control to the artist.
Unbundle the music license payment from music delivery payment.
The reason labels have such high overheads is the same as for movie studios . They subsidise a lot of non-Taylor Swifts music that don't end up being profitable. The costs of the failures end up impacting the profits of the successes. The flip side is - lots of artists get studio time and songwriting time even if they haven't already proven themselves.
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 less free music. The discretionary income of the median person is simply not that high, and a rich person won't start buying hundreds of albums to make up for the ones the working class can't afford.
And people listening to less music instead of pirating may be more just or moral or whatever, but it doesn't pay the artists' bill anymore than piracy does.
I may be old school - I pay for things, I am happy to pay for things.
I, on the other hand, am new school, part of a generation with 25%+ unemployment and many more in precarious jobs. It's not that we don't like to pay for things - it's that's often simply not an option.
If SOPA had passed, we would've just go back to sneakernet sharing.
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.
That's not what I said, please read again.
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.
Sure. That's why I said it might be more just and moral. Please read my post attentively before replying.
But how many artists has your self-sacrifice of not pirating actually helped, compared to someone who spends the same amount but also pirates?
I do believe that in Taylor Swift's case, you can't; at least not all of it. She didn't put her latest album on Spotify either. Honestly, I've got little sympathy for her: she's the most famous and successful singer-songwriter in the last decade by far, and these sorts of stunts don't really endear her in my eyes. But she doesn't care, 'cause haters gonna hate hate hate, right?
I'm not a "content creator", I'm a developer. What I do has a lot more in common with what a plumber or an electrician does than with what Taylor Swift does. My programs are not expressions of my soul, they're well-crafted tools to solve a particular problem that I have either a) been paid to solve, or b) hope to sell to somebody else to solve their problem.
Music is always competing with its back catalog, and old music weathers the years a lot better than old video games.
Maybe I'm an edge case, but I bought music until I got a Spotify subscription. Now the only time I buy is when it's not available (for instance, Tech N9ne latest album was on iTunes a week or two before Spotify)
- If artist sells music on a DRM-free downloading service like bandcamp.com, support them
- Otherwise let them starve
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.
Most services eat the cost of trial periods in hopes of snaring subscribers and making up the loss. Apple is being dishonest by claiming free trial while passing off the costs to the artists by relying on Apple's name and status so as not to have people question it. In other words, they are spinning the story faster that old 78s
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?
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 profit you speak of means profit to Apple, but a loss to the music industry.
True, but that's because the labels keep the vast majority of Spotify's payout.
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.
Are there? (At least for independent musicians?) From my experience, it seems like a decent comparison—you can make an app or album for $2000 or $200k.
- Different pricing. Apps can be anywhere from $1 to $500, while songs typically hover around $0.99. The wide variance in app pricing makes a subscription model challenging to satisfy all users and developers.
- Different markets. When you make an app, you're tying it to be used on a specific platform. It is additional work to make it cross-platform. That alone is limiting for an apps' market, and in the case of iOS, the platform's owner can impose additional limits. Music is open-ish in the sense that you can make music once and release it in a way that it's playable, essentially, everywhere.
- Different revenue streams. Music is a digital good like apps, but it's also a physical good (CDs, records) and most importantly it's a service (live performances). It's possible to have additional revenue streams with apps, but it's not as common as it is with music. If Apple spontaneously created an app subscription model and your app was iOS only, you would suddenly be very locked into that business model, whereas with music you will always have additional options.
All the more reason app developers shouldn't/wouldn't go for such a deal.
This is slightly off topic, but it seems that iTunes song prices have silently increased to $1.29, which is a huge increase. There are still some $0.99 songs out there, but most of the tracks I buy are $1.29.
Seriously though, here in Australia the regular price for a track is $2.19 -- which is absolutely ludicrous to be honest. As of today, that's the equivalent of $1.70USD
http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2014/11/25/band-ju...
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, you can much cheaper degree (I did) and live in a cheaper region (I had), but that almost guarantees hitting a lower career ceiling than if you have a Berkeley diploma and live in San Jose.
Almost all careers involve tradeoffs. If you want to rise to the limits of your abilities you're going to have to make some hard decisions. Otherwise you'll be competing with the other workers who are happy to get paid less for easier work. In tech, this means a mid-range job in a small market. For musicians, this means playing gigs in Des Moines instead of clubs in LA. Them's the breaks.
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.
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, rather than the other way around.
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.
I presume Apple are trying to establish differentiation through the 'radio' service, but since the baseline market requirement is the ability to listen to practically anything all-you-can-eat, it'll be hard for them to achieve it there.
And think of all the cool new laborious, overcomplicated, and time-consuming UI designs we could look forward to!
Then what stops shady slot game app developer from keeping his app running in the background 24/7 and trashing the commons (or private garden, I guess)? Technical solutions can probably go a decent amount of the way, but there will always be a work-around...
> Apple simultaneously announces a 3 month free trial for all App Store accounts, and states that it will be making no payments to developers during that trial since users are not paying for it.
That's a terrible offer no matter how you cut it.
They expect Apple, Spotify, Pandora etcetera to take all the risk (including the major risk of being unilaterally torpedoed by those same artists), do all the upfront investment and then whine about not getting a big enough piece of the cake.
Taylor Swift is being an outlier here in the respectful way in which she communicates. And she knows it, that's why she chooses her words very carefully.
Most of these artist just bitch and whine about their percentage, ignoring the fact that, with antiquated copyright laws firmly on the side of the music industry, technology firms are taking quite insane risk in their attempts to innovate the way music connects to the listeners.
If they hadn't, sales of music would have totally flatlined by now and those artist would be way worse off.
Go to top revenue: none of those apps are paid. They're all free (with in app purchase). The market itself "raced to the bottom" to a world where, yeah, most the apps actually succeeding due in fact operate as if they're "free" for x months, and then you make orthogonal purchases. Sure, no one is stopping you from charging 99$ for an app on the store, but most of us know that relying on that model is like hoping you're a NBA-level player (or rock star, ha!).
Developers aren't complaining, well, they are, but aren't desperate because we at least have created an alternative for ourselves. Sure, we all wish we could charge box-sale rates, but at least we;ve figured out something to do instead. Maybe this is what the music industry needs to do. Maybe I should be able to listen to anything I want but be able to in app purchase taylor swift emoji or t-shirts or what have you. Maybe that looks like an innovative industry as opposed to having come up with exactly ONE new idea of how to sell music (rhapsody style streaming) in the last 10 years. These are teens we're talking about here. Put a teen in a mall and tell me its hard to get them to buy something. Come On! If they're not buying the EXACT something you're offering, maybe its worth tweaking it just a TINY amount.
This is kind of the problem though. You might, but most iOS developers would take the lumps and continue on as normal. iOS is too lucrative a market to ditch on philosophical grounds. After all, if Apple did adopt this policy, it's not even clear that it would be their worst offense regarding the iOS app ecosystem.
And that's the lesson Apple learned from iOS. They're just applying it now to their music store.
Why? Apple negotiated that arrangement with those artists' labels, who agreed that this was a fair and equitable situation. You and I might like to think that we would have chosen otherwise, but the people involved in this contract were happy with the outcome.
Remember, Apple didn't unilaterally come up with this. They didn't just open a service and announce that they weren't going to pay anyone.
Precisely. We're talking about a company with $200 billion in cash reserves asking artists - many independent and hardly famous - to subsidize their marketing efforts.
But what if you had just ditched Android (i.e. Spotify) last year after publicly complaining about its usurious terms?
I have an app that is "expensive" ($15) but I have dedicated users who paid once four years ago and continue to use the app today. All the major updates since have been free. While I don't know whether the pay-by-usage model would be financially better for me, I'd be pretty open minded about it and wouldn't mind the free trial.
http://readwrite.com/2011/08/02/amazons_growing_appstore_pro...
The revenue from all users is pooled, and then divided per listen rather than per user/artist etc.
So this'd be like splitting the app store sub revenue by "app launches" or some other bullshit.
Pop junk like Taylor gets a far higher fraction of revenue than they deserve, from teens listening to it non-stop.
Artists that I like get 0% of my cash, even if I listen to nothing but their music.
The system would at least be fair in scope if artists got a share of each users subscription fee, split per listen for the songs they listened to.
That the payments involved are very small and mostly go to middlemen is a separate problem, the whole system is designed to fuck niche artists.
I care about a world where the most useful apps are rewarded.
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 a full quarter of revenue from every new App Store user in the interest of Apple acquiring subscribers. Do you think it would be a great deal for app developers to not be paid for three months of every single App Store user's usage?
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.
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 usefuler than say Pinterest, people spend a lot more time on Pinterest.
Don't get me wrong, I do see why the losers are probably the 99¢ apps, after all, you probably do not use those on a concurrent basis. Yet, if we go by the hourly usage, people use social networks like Pinterest and Facebook, games like Temple Run, and music services, to a much greater degree overall.
Oh wait.
If they were able to track how often a person used an app then I don't think that would be too bad except for extremely niche apps which are usually enterprise already. I would take a smaller payment if I got paid $0.01 for three minutes my app was open on a phone, rather than charging $0.99 (or even $2.99)... It depends on the app though
In other words, If I only listen to 'my favorite niche band' in a month, but don't use the service much, it's unlikely that they will see anything near the full possible share of royalties from that months $10. The system instead is biased to musicians whose fans use the system most heavily on loop - ironically more likely to be taylor swift type pop megastars.
[edit - explained more clearly by http://lit.vulf.de/spotify-so-little/]
Anyone know how apple will compare on royalties after the 3 month period compared to spotify? I've been a spotify premium subscriber since 2009, but would move to a system that meets my definition of equitable.
"For $9.99/month users will receive unlimited access to all apps on the App Store. Developers will receive a share of each user's subscription payments in proportion to app usage."
is exactly what Kachingle unveiled back in 2010, and the public hated it. So, if this wasn't Apple pulling this stunt, we know how much the public would hate it.
Indeed, you can see Google attempting to attract developers to its ecosystem and away from Apple's in some of their recent developer policy changes (no app review times, etc).
But now we're getting way off topic. :)
From what I have observed, most people (the casual listener) will listen to the free streaming services (pandora, apple radio, etc). When people want to listen to a specific song they listen to it on youtube.
If there was a subscription program for apps, I could see apple introducing a similar trial period.
> Tomorrow, Apple announces that it will be introducing an "App Store Subscription." For $9.99/month users will receive unlimited access to all apps on the App Store. Developers will receive a share of each user's subscription payments in proportion to app usage. Apple simultaneously announces a 3 month free trial for all App Store accounts, and states that it will be making no payments to developers during that trial since users are not paying for it.
I, personally, would ditch iOS development for Android in a heartbeat if that happened. I can't blame musicians for having a similar reaction.