A new report from Bloomberg today claims that Apple is considering $10-$15 month plans for its upcoming music streaming service while the company approaches high-profile artists to get exclusive content.
The report today follows our own report last month that Apple was planning to relaunch its Beats Music streaming service at its WWDC event in June. At the time we noted that Apple was considering a $7.99 price point, but today’s report suggests Apple could go with paid tiers ranging from $9.99/month for a single user to $14.99/month for a family account.
Apple is also said to be approaching high-profile artists in order to land exclusive content for the new service. Some of those artists include Florence and the Machine, Taylor Swift, and “more than a dozen other artists,” according to Bloomberg.
Apple is thought to have even more competition in that arena as Jay-Z launched a competitive service called Tidal last month, tapping many big name artists to promote and release exclusive content for the service.
A recent report claimed that Apple exec and music industry bigwig Jimmy Iovine was attempting to lure artists away from making deals with Tidal, while Kanye West reportedly said he passed on “a multimillion dollar partnership with Apple” in a new profile published today. It’s unclear if his comments were related to Apple’s much anticipated upcoming music service, which we noted in our original report will be based on technology Apple acquired from Beats Music.
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So are those artists with Tidal not going to release music on itunes? I doubt it
Oh no, they’ll take the money, don’t worry about that.
With all the options out there, including my own music collection, I don’t see any reason why I would pay for a streaming service. I think this will flop, if they’re really charging that much.
Let’s put it this way; Let us say that all your favorite artists quit your free streaming service (because they don’t pay them; as any market economy would). Then you had no choice, but to either pirate (which is illegal) or to cough up a fair price. You might get higher quality music, if you paid the piper.
I think we’ve reached a tipping point with streaming where artists who aren’t on all the mainstream services will simply be off the radar of public consciousness. With the exception of Thom Yorke’s last solo release and MBV’s last album, which I bought, I’ve just done without titles I can’t get via streaming. There’s too much music out there for “free” (via standard subscription) to catch up with to worry about access to some corporation’s idea of premium content.
One thing all of the artists slated for the exclusive tier have in common, including Taylor Swift, is that their careers were well established before Spotify came to the US. So incumbents like Jay-Z or Coldplay might have some leverage with exclusives, but newer artists won’t be able to exploit the same tiers. Apple is protecting the fiefdoms of one-percenter artists at the expense of the majority of artists who don’t have the cachet to benefit from another paywall. It would make much more sense for artists who aren’t in Apple’s premium canon to make most of their content available on standard-tier services, and strategically reserve a portion of their work for sale via Bandcamp, iTunes, their official sites, etc.
Yeah, so far, no one has made a Net Profit from streaming services. I only have iTunes radio because I use iTunes Match, but I don’t use it that often.
Getting access to a larger catalog is great so we can create our own playlists and only pay a set amount each month, but to some of us, me included, I want Lossless. On my system I can tell the difference between Lossy AAC 320kbps and Lossless, but the problem is you need more bandwidth so it doesn’t have the buffering issues.
It’s a tough call how long these guys are going to last.
I did a little research on Netflix and the difference they have is they just pay a set amount to get whatever movies and TV shows, so they have been able to manage to get a Net Profit, albeit not a high margin business. Apple, doesn’t rely solely on streaming music or digital downloads as it was more to encourage legal downloads to support the iPod eco-system.
All these famous celebrities are doing is just spitting out some ‘exclusive’ material to attract the masses to these services, either as a short term or long term differentiator. Since I don’t really listen to much of the current pop music, it doesn’t really affect me.
As far as these apps are designed, the Spotify is in my opinion the best, but they are Lossy. Tidal’s UI is OK, but the playlist titles they have are pretty generic. I just prefer to do my own searches on recordings and create my own playlist. But it is nice to have a more complete catalog than the radio type streaming services.
Unsurprised to see reports coming out that Apple is in talks with Swift. The tie up on 1989 did well
So you can pay $15 a month to stream Taylor Swift, or you can pay $10 to own it. Captain Obvious is confused!
You can pay $10 to own one Taylor Swift album….or $15 a month to stream every Taylor Swift album as well as anything else in the iTunes library.
Yes, I’d say confused is an accurate description.
So, is every album and every song going to be on demand at any time with this service?
Taylor Swift backlist is already available on all the major streaming services. She only pulled her latest album.
Whether the exclusive tier model works will depend on how many exclusives month-to-month will appeal to audiences. For me, based on the exclusives indicated to date, the answer is zero, but if enough people regularly find that two or three artist exclusives each month are must-haves, then the premium tier might be economically viable.
Moreover, if Beats’ exclusives are unavailable to subscribers or Spotify, Rdio, etc., there’s pretty much no incentive to switch to Beats’ standard tier, since there’s no value added (and the pain of losing one’s networks of “friends” on their current service).
My biggest problem with the new model is that it utterly fails to fundamentally change the way the vast majority of artists are compensated. Beyond a couple of dozen artists that will get a handsome payout from Apple (like U2 did for their free iTunes offering), everyone else will get a fraction-of-a-cent royalty per stream. This is simply an expensive PR campaign to make the highest profile artists look appropriately remunerated while the rest of the value chain is unchanged.
Sorry guys, streaming is the future, whether you like it or not.
And they are bringing this to android also?
At that price point, Apple better deliver every bit of the features or more offered by Spotify or it is not going anywhere.
15 dollars for streaming and iTunes match… i might even consider that..
Lol Kanye West had no choice.. Jay-Z is his boss..
Streaming is good until you decide to end your subscription: you paid all of that money, but have no ownership of your content. and Unless you really blow more than $10 (on average) on music every single month for remainder of your lifetime it’s not worth getting subscription. Just my opinion on this matter.
You can either resubscribe when you want access to the full catalog again, or just buy the individual works when you’re ready to. With streaming you can listen to something long enough to know if you’ll keep listening to it. I’m old enough to have built a large collection of purchased music, much of which I no longer listen to but still keep in my iTunes collection based on a “sunk cost” resistance to deleting it.
Beyond the mercantile “ownership” value, there isn’t much advantage to hoarding music, and a host of advantages to streaming. Artists, albums and tracks are frequently annotated by profiles and reviews, favorite tracks are identified by listeners you can follow, you can find listeners with similar tastes and discover what they’re listening to, you have access to a vast array of playlists and stations, etc. Unless you’ve reached an age where your interest in music discovery has ossified, streaming is a much fresher way to experience music.
The whole music and movies streaming thing is a plague to the whole business and customers.
Paying for owning nothing is just plain dumb. Money in a trash can.
How is $10 expensive? It is the same as Spotify. And I would happily pay $5 extra to get the whole family on there.
If Apple can actually meet, or exceed, Spotify then it isn’t bad.
However, what I don’t think Apple seems to get is that it can charge a premium price for its hardware because that hardware is actually premium.
Their services are far from premium. They are almost always stumbling along with them. Heck, look at iTunes Match. When the service was first announced there were numerous complaints about songs duplicating or uploading despite being bought from iTunes. Not a big deal, little hiccups in a new service. Three years later and they still never fixed those issues.
When Apple takes something seriously they make a premium product. When Apple does something as a hobby it isn’t worth a premium price and is almost always left in the dust because they don’t fix it and upgrade it like they should.
Only time will tell if Apple is finally going to take streaming music seriously or if this is just another hobby for them like iTunes Match.