Linked List: June 21, 2015

Sunday, 21 June 2015

Apple’s Justification for Apple Music’s Three-Month Free Trial Period: Slightly Higher Payments ★

Peter Kafka, writing last week for Recode:

Here are the real numbers, according to Robert Kondrk, the Apple executive who negotiates music deals along with media boss Eddy Cue: In the U.S., Apple will pay music owners 71.5 percent of Apple Music’s subscription revenue. Outside the U.S., the number will fluctuate, but will average around 73 percent, he told Re/code in an interview. Executives at labels Apple is working with confirmed the figures. […]

Apple won’t pay music owners anything for the songs that are streamed during Apple Music’s three-month trial period, a bone of contention with music labels during negotiations for the new service. But Kondrk says Apple’s payouts are a few percentage points higher than the industry standard, in part to account for the lengthy trial period; most paid subscription services offer a free one-month trial.

Not sure a 1.5 percent difference justifies two extra months of free service (compared to the de facto industry standard one-month free trial), but it’s not nothing.

Taylor Swift on Apple Music’s Three-Month Free Trial ★

Taylor Swift, explaining why she’s withholding her latest album from Apple Music:

I’m sure you are aware that Apple Music will be offering a free 3 month trial to anyone who signs up for the service. I’m not sure you know that Apple Music will not be paying writers, producers, or artists for those three months. I find it to be shocking, disappointing, and completely unlike this historically progressive and generous company. […]

Three months is a long time to go unpaid, and it is unfair to ask anyone to work for nothing. I say this with love, reverence, and admiration for everything else Apple has done. I hope that soon I can join them in the progression towards a streaming model that seems fair to those who create this music. I think this could be the platform that gets it right.

Not sure what the solution is here, but her position seems perfectly reasonable. The problem is, Apple is leading the industry in pushing for streaming music to be entirely behind a paywall. The entire point of the free trial is to get more people to pay for streaming in the long term.

Also raises the question of just how many other top-shelf music acts will not be available on Apple Music when it launches. After the WWDC keynote, I simply could not get a straight answer from anyone at Apple about just how much of the iTunes Music library will be available on Apple Music when it launches. Part of that might be that they’re still negotiating with some labels and top-shelf acts, but I can’t help but suspect part of it is that they know they’re not going to have everything, and they don’t want to talk about that.