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The long-running iTunes music festival - an event which mostly exists so the music industry can be gently reminded who is in charge here - is being rebranded this year as the Apple Music festival.
Amongst the acts: Florence and One Direction. 1D playing the Roundhouse is an interesting way to create the maximum number of upset excluded fans in one go.
The decision of the High Court to make it illegal again to rip a CD you've purchased for money to play on a device of your choosing we've covered before. There's another sting to the judgement, though, as Consequence Of Sound have discovered. If you store your legally purchased music on your computer, and you back up your hard drive, you're a criminal, chummy:
the Government spokesperson went on to add that, “… It includes creating back-ups without permission from the copyright holder as this necessarily involves an act of copying.” In other words, if you legally purchase digital media online, you are now not legally allowed to back up that information on an external hard drive of any sort. In the long run, that means if your computer were to crash or get stolen, your only allowable course of action would be to re-purchase all your music and movies.(I'm sure Apple and Amazon would both point out that if you buy through them, your purchase is recorded and free to download again at any time.)
"Oh come on, you guys. Even though it's about a million years since we bought Dre's ugly headphone company to get their streaming technology, and we've been signing up DJs all over the place, couldn't you at least pretend that our new Apple streaming service is some sort of a surprise?"
Yes, after years of Spotify being posited as an iTunes killer, effectively with Apple Music, iTunes is going to try and kill Spotify.
We'll just sit here and wait for the first "have you seen the tiny royalties Apple Music are paying" stories which, with the service launching at the end of June, we're expecting some time round early September.
Apple are hoping that nobody reminds them about the can't fail music service Ping right now.
Who knew? That time when the U2 album cluttered up desktops and mobiles across the world wasn't a dying dinosaur's desperate grab for relevance. It turns out it was gay propaganda all along:
In Russia, Duma deputy Alexander Starovoitov, a member of the far right LDPR party, asked Russia's attorney general to investigate U2 for distributing "gay pornography" to minors.Now, if only Bono had thought of that line at the time, maybe he might have found some support.
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This is apparently because of the album's cover picture (by Glen Luchford) of U2 drummer Larry Mullen jr embracing his 18-year-old son, Elvis. Both were shirtless.
You've got to hand it to Bono - just days after not realising nobody wanted his rump-reeking new record, even for free, he's coming up with another thing that people are neither seeking, nor requiring:
In a new Time magazine article, the singer has detailed the group's plans to help combat the illegal downloading of artists' music by creating a new file format which cannot be copied.Unless there's some magic way it doesn't need to pass audio to an output, let me stop you right there Bono and say it doesn't work.
The aim of the top secret project is to tempt fans to purchase full albums, not just individual tracks, once more so new material will once again become profitable for artists who aren't big on touring.The problem here, Bono, is that 'bundling stuff into albums' is a thing that was convenient for labels and artists. It wasn't, ever, a thing that happened because music fans went to bed wishing that when they bought six songs they liked, they could get another four tracks they didn't like, and would never play.
Guy Oseary, current U2 manager, isn't brooking any criticism of the flopped U2 album stunt. He tells Mashabale:
"It’s a gift from Apple," Oseary said. "If someone doesn’t like the gift, they should delete it. ... There are people who are going to be thrilled to get a gift. There are people who are not going to care to have this gift. We knew all of that going in. No surprises here. If someone doesn’t like it, then great, that’s OK, delete it. ... We just want to share it with as many people as possible. If you don’t want it and you don’t need it, delete it."If it was just as simple as deleting it, this would still grate - because why should it be incumbent upon a person to have to clean up the firm turd left on their living room carpet? True, you can just pick it up and throw it away, but it might have been nicer to be asked in the first place - 'Do you want a free U2 album' - so we could all say 'is it one from the early 80s?' before going 'no'.
A lot of people, from the look of the iTunes chart, are clearly rediscovering the band’s catalog or discovering it for the first time.But then, asked about if it was disappointing that the record wasn't yet eligible for Billboard:
It doesn’t bother me because I haven’t even wrapped my head around it yet. I’m not looking at the charts as high on my list of concerns.I mean, who cares about charts, right, unless the information they're giving us is useful for the purposes of spinning the biggest backsplash PR disaster since someone wrote 'New' on a flipchart at the Coca-Cola Company?
Hi Apple.
Why is there a shitting U2 album in my iTunes this morning?
Why would you do that?
What do you think the advantage to me is of having, hidden amongst music that I actually like and want to have in my collection, a U2 album that I did not ask for, do not want, or would never seek out?
By all means, offer the record in your store. Advertise its availability far and wide. Float U2 on the magma atop a volcano, film the event in HD and book every advertising slot on every TV channel to show the results.
But do not, ever, insert unsolicited bullcrap into my iTunes library. Ever. You're making a Surface seem like a good idea.
I don't even seem to be able to delete the stinking things, either...
Where's the best place to buy an iTunes exclusive album?
You know what really upsets Spotify's head of label relations in Europe, Kevin Brown? It's when people compare his lovely service with iTunes:
"I don’t see iTunes as our primary competitor - that’s YouTube," said Brown, criticising labels that decide to keep albums off Spotify in favour of exclusive deals with iTunes. "We’re still put in the same bucket as iTunes by some labels, whose music then appears on YouTube. That drives me nuts."Boy, if he hates being compared with iTunes rather than YouTube, this is going to drive him over the edge:
"Some of our partners are saying Spotify is now generating more revenue each month across Continental Europe than iTunes[...]That's someone inside Spotify putting the service in the same bucket as iTunes. Brown's going to be fighting mad with them, yeah? Who was it who did such a terrible thing?
"Given that download sales are declining and Spotify is growing rapidly, particularly in the UK, it is only a matter of time before Spotify is bigger than iTunes across Europe as a whole."
Spotify's head of label relations in Europe, Kevin Brown, told industry site Music Week.Oh.
It turns out that the only people in the world who are surprised by the weak start for iTunes Radio are people at Apple who, according to Billboard, are surprised to discover if you offer people a decent, customisable streaming service, they become reluctant to buy:
iTunes Radio, which launched in September with much fanfare, so far only sees about 1%-2% of listeners clicking the buy button, while overall music downloads have been declining upwards of 15%, according to several label executives."Hey, you can come by and pet my kitten whenever you like. Whenever you want, just knock on the door and you can pet my kitten. 24 hours a day. Kittens on demand. Oh... would you like to give me some money and you can take the kitten home? No?"
One independent label said that iTunes’s share of the label’s revenue has eroded from more than 70% in 2012 to about 50% today.Apple have, in effect, have had the labels' nipples in clamps since the launch of the iPod - and the labels have squirmed, but they've liked the experience. Now, controlling 50% of the market is still a couple of screws on the clamp, but if that figure keeps falling the majors are going to start shouting their safe word. Without dominance, Apple's relationship with the mainstream music industry is going to change, and not in Apple's favour.
There's a smattering of panic at the news that Osborne is adding VAT to downloads from places like iTunes and the other, less successful, stores.
People who are reacting now do realise that, while it's true Osborne has done this, he did it in the 2013 budget and this year merely repeated it, right?
Overpriced headphone manufacturer Beats has taken a step closer to launching its streaming music service, with an app going live in the Apple app store:
The service, which goes up against the likes of Spotify, Rdio, Pandora and iTunes Radio — as well as Mega CEO Kim Dotcom‘s new music streaming service Baboom – will cost $9.99 per month for unlimited streaming from its catalog of more than 20 million songs.Besides the ability for journalists to mention Dr Dre in articles about the service, it's not entirely clear what Beats believes makes it different from other streaming services.
Can you hear the world, holding its breath, for the launch of Apple iRadio?
Nope, me neither.
The sheer lack of people who say "you know what I wish? I wish I could stream music through the iTunes interface" has always been noticeable.
It's likely that Apple will make the service a success, simply through plonking the iRadio button on homescreens of devices, and maybe there'll be something to the service unveiled today that makes it essential, or desirable, but it's hard to see the problem with music streaming that needs Apple to solve it.
AllThingsD tries to describe what we can expect:
[It] should function like an enhanced version of Pandora — that is, it will be a free streaming music service that gives users more control of their songs than standard Web radio, but less than full on-demand services like Spotify.That's... uh, clear. The idea is that the tracks you hear will be half-determined by you telling it what you want to hear, and half it scanning your iTunes history. You know that time you bought the Crazy Frog to burn onto a CD for a joke for your brother? THAT will be the guiding light that iRadio seizes on to build your playlists. That, and the thirty unplayed episodes of OpenSouceSex.
The majors publishers had looked like they were going to be the holdout because Apple initially offered to pay them a rate of 4.1% of its advertising revenue, while the publishers had been withdrawing digital rights from the U.S. performance rights organizations BMI and ASCAP because they wanted higher rates. BMG, Sony/ATV, UMPG and Warner/Chappell executives had privately said they were seeking rates of 10%-15% of iRadio’s advertising revenue. But when Apple agreed to a 10% rate, Warner/Chappell last week signed the deal and now so has Sony/ATV.Getting more than double Apple wanted to pay. That's quite a strong move by the majors. Let's hope they don't do that thing where they suddenly get insanely greedy.
While publishers will get 10% of revenue, they privately are calling this an introductory rate, meaning that after the iRadio service establishes itself, they expect that rate to increase. Likewise, they also say they expect Pandora to match the deals they are doing now with Apple."We won't hold our ground when we have the advantage and Apple really needs us for launch. Oh, no. What we'll do, right, is wait until the service is established, and carrying itself along under its own sheer weight of numbers. At that point, when we've got massive sums of cash flowing in from Apple, we'll be in a really strong position to threaten to refuse to take that money any more unless they give us more. At the same time, with Apple crushing Pandora into near-obscurity, that'd be exactly the moment to ask Pandora to give us more of the less money it's making. Genius plan, eh, guys?"
In the Wisconsin Law Review, Mike Masnick explains why the war on Napster didn't only fail to stop piracy, but also put the brakes on innovative new companies working in online music. In short: Had the RIAA been less keen to kill Napster, perhaps Apple wouldn't have ended up stealing their business:
This should have been obvious from the fact that people would flock to these new services, yet failed to show up to the record labels’ own attempts to innovate or provide something new. However, as soon as any service showed any kind of promise, even if “licensed,” the labels would seek to kill the golden goose by claiming that the rates were unfair, and the innovators were making money unfairly off the backs of the copyright holders (by which they meant the labels, not the musicians, of course).
Take, for example, the brief heyday of music video games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band. For a year or two, the recording industry fell head over heels in love with these games, because people were playing them quite a bit, and they were (briefly) willing to pay a slight premium to get access to music from well-known bands and musicians. Rather than build on that, the industry did two things: it focused all of its attention on those kinds of games, absolutely flooding the market and making people get sick of the game genre, and demanded much higher royalties.
The viewpoint seemed to be that there could be almost no benefits for the innovators. Nearly all of the benefits had to accrue to the labels, or it would be seen as a problem. In fact, the one exception that got through was iTunes, and that was quickly seen as a “problem” by the labels, even as it was dragging them, kicking and screaming, into the marketplace for digital music. The view is one of an extreme zero-sum world, where if someone else is benefiting, it must mean that the labels were losing out. They didn’t even hide this view of the world. Doug Morris, then head of Universal Music (now head of Sony Music) explained to a Wired reporter that investing in new innovations that weren’t paying money upfront meant that “someone, somewhere is taking advantage of you.” As laid out in the article, Morris was uninterested in technology, and didn’t even know how to hire a competent technology person, so his focus was on making sure everyone paid up immediately. Anyone making money in the music world without first paying a massive cut were dubbed “thieves.”
Back in March, writing about the IFPI's response to the EU study finding that unlicenced filesharing might lead to a small rise in sales, I asked if it could possibly be true that Nielsen counted plugging in an iPhone to recharge as a visit to iTunes.
The IFPI were polite, but fundamentally unhelpful when I asked them about what they were basing this claim on; happily, Nielsen were a bit more forthcoming and confirmed that iTunes data does include plugging in the phone:
After some internal research, I can confirm that IFPI's description of the NetView methodology is correct. How Nielsen looks at iTunes: anytime the app is active in focus, which can include any iTunes activity from listening to music to purchasing movies to synchronizing devices etc, which would include purchasing music but not limited to this activity.Blimey.
The BPI has, at least, resisted the temptation to describe the 19% of UK music buyers who only ever download as "digital natives". Let's be thankful for that.
They seem thrilled by this news, as it gives it something positive to say after a grim couple of months.
"There has rightly been a lot of focus in the past few weeks on high street music retail. That will continue – we must do all we can to serve music fans who love CDs and vinyl," said the BPI chief executive, Geoff Taylor.I'm not sure what he means here - does he mean that high street retail will continue? Or the "focus" on it will continue? And whose focus? Ours? The BPI's?
We're working very hard together with AIM [Association of Independent Music] in talks with the administrator of HMV. Secondly, we are talking to [U.K. collection society] PRS for Music about the way that publishers approach mechanical royalties on stock for which labels are not being paid, or only being paid a fraction of its value. It's important that the publishing community help labels ensure that HMV has a viable future and that as much of HMV can emerge as a viable ongoing concern as possible.Obviously, you wouldn't expect Taylor to detail exactly what moves were being made, but given that's an interview with a trade magazine, you'd expect something more than "we're having chats with the people managing the decline" as a roadmap.
But as well as great music stores...You're going to have to speak up, Geoff, we can't hear you above the sound of boards being nailed over HMV windows.
...Britain is blessed with a world-beating array of digital music services, which fans rate very highly for ease of use and value for money. And this is just the beginning."Only a puritan hides his fear of Springtime by pretending to celebrate it. There's a hollowness to this embrace of digital from an organisation whose members struggled against the tide for so long.
If you read the round-ups of what's popular on the site, you'll know a perennial favourite item is AC/DC's firm holdout against iTunes:
“We don’t make singles, we make albums,” [Angus Young] told the Telegraph. “We believe the songs on any of our albums belong together. If we were on iTunes, we know a certain percentage of people would only download two or three songs from the album. We don’t think that represents us musically.”Apparently, they've had a bit of a rethink. Look at the front page of their website:
Samsung thinks it knows how to hurt Apple: it's bought mSpot, a not-quite-Spotify clone, with the idea of - naturally - killing iTunes.
There's a couple of problems with this. First, mSpot doesn't really hold a suite of rights that would currently make it a viable option, so bringing it up to standard is going to cost.
Secondly, Samsung is really only interested in selling tech, so why is it getting caught up running a music-streaming service at all? Nokia's nightmare with ComesWithMusic shows that it's a difficult path to take, and doesn't really seem to have much impact on the core business one way or another.
iTunes was vital to the success of the iPod; I'm not so sure that Apple would have bothered overmuch with creating it for the iPhone.
It makes sense, right? Sainsburys sells apples, so it can be like Apple. Or, at least, it's going to offer downloads through its website.
But wait, it's not just another download site in an already overcrowded market:
To differentiate the service from Apple iTunes and other music download stores, Sainsbury's said that each download...Yes?
... will earn customers Nectar Card loyalty points.Except that isn't actually true, as individual tracks cost 89p, and - if you spend a very long time searching through the site, eventually you'll find this:
Nectar points are awarded at 2 points per full £1 spent on the site. Therefore, if your item costs £4.99, you will be awarded 8 nectar points.It doesn't make explicit, but, equally therefore, if you buy twenty single tracks in twenty transactions, you'll earn, erm, no Nectar points whatsoever.
Spotify is going to outstrip iTunes. In a couple of years. According to Spotify:
Speaking at the annual South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Texas, on a music discussion panel, the Spotify and Facebook investor [Sean Parker] said: “If Spotify continues growing at its current rate in terms of subscribers and users, we will overtake iTunes in terms of the amount of revenue we contribute to the music labels in under two years.”Well, yes. There is a rather large "if" there; there's also a secondary "if" that assumes that new subscribers and users will consume music at the same rate as earlier adopters. There's also a third "if", that this might rely on iTunes staying where it is.
