“Ahead of its launch of an online radio service Apple circulated terms to independent record labels last week, many of them more generous to the music companies than what rival Pandora Media currently pays,” Hannah Karp and Jessica E. Lessin report for The Wall Street Journal.
“Apple intends to pay royalties to labels based on a blend of how many times listeners hear their songs and how much advertising Apple sells, according to the terms, which were reviewed by The Wall Street Journal,” Karp and Lessin report. “During iTunes Radio’s first year, Apple will pay a label 0.13 cents each time a song is played, as well as 15% of net advertising revenue, proportionate to a given label’s share of the music played on iTunes. In the second year, that bumps up to 0.14 cents per listen, plus 19% of ad revenue.”
Karp and Lessin report, “That compares to the 0.12 cents Pandora pays labels per listen on its free service. Apple is also offering music publishers more than twice as much in royalties than Pandora does.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Ellis D.” for the heads up.]
From Apple’s website:
“Tune in to iTunes Radio on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, PC, or Apple TV. You’ll have access to Featured Stations, stations inspired by the music you already listen to, and more than 200 genre-focused stations — including everything from Hard Rock to Doo Wop. Your stations evolve based on the music you play and download. So the more you use iTunes Radio and iTunes, the more iTunes Radio knows what you like to listen to — and the more personalized your experience becomes.”
Targeted music based on your iTunes music listening habits. It’s a win for both the record labels and consumers.
“But it’s unlikely Apple will invest much in creating such programming, given that it has long shied from creating its own content.”
This is not true kind of. Apple has developed Genius service that helps people to find music from their own library. You can choose a song and ask Genius to make a playlist from it. iRadio will do exactly this. So the listener (you) creates their own “radio stations” around what they want to listen using the power of Genius. Everybody contributes to the Genius database how and what they listen and in what order or what songs they skip. I use Genius playlists all the time because in that way I discover my music always in a new way. So the “programming” is there, but it is not made by one human. It is made by humans. It is “community-based radio programming”. I can’t wait this thing to come to my country.
these “radio” services are terrible deals for the people actually supplying the content: musicians
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music-artists-earn-online/
ITunes radio, underestimated and discounted before it even have launched. It will be a killer!
But we have to look out. Maybe DOJ will gin after them for raising prices…