Apple’s said it pays music artists and rights holders a penny per Apple Music stream, “roughly double” Spotify‘s rate, The Wall Street Journal reports Friday, citing an Apple Music letter to artists.
According to the report, Apple Music pays 52% of its subscription revenue to record labels, while Spotify pays an average of about one-third to one-half penny per stream.
Anne Steele for The Wall Street Journal:
The disclosure, made in a letter to artists delivered Friday via the service’s artist dashboard and sent to labels and publishers, is part of a growing effort by music-streaming services to show they are artist-friendly. For Apple Inc., it can be seen as a riposte to Spotify Technology SA, which last month shared some details of how it pays the music industry for streams on its service.
Artists, managers and lawyers, still reeling from the loss of touring revenue during the pandemic, have been calling for higher payouts from music streaming, which has grown rapidly in the past year. Many fans have joined the push to raise artists’ compensation.
Apple last reported more than 60 million Music subscribers in June 2019. Spotify leads the industry in subscriptions with 155 million, out of 345 million total active users including those who listen for free to the ad-supported tier. Amazon said early last year that its music subscription offerings had 55 million subscribers.
Apple’s five-year-old subscription music streaming service, Apple Music, already No.1 in America, the No.1 music market, is gaining on fifteen-year-old Spotify, according to Loup Ventures which said in September that Apple is converting potential customers into paying customers at a rate 2.5x faster than Spotify.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple Music offers far better support to artists than Spotify. Fans who wish to support their favorite artists should use Apple Music, not Spotify.
Apple Music is somewhat annoying. Selecting singer/songwriters of the 90’s was all women for the first 10 songs. The top hits, which is different than most popular, is 99% hip hop. It lacks proper curation of basic sub-genres, such as 80’s classic hip hop or new wave.
That’s a coincidence! Apple also pays pennies to the slave labor building their iPhones!
So are your Nike shoes Dude, your Levi jeans Dude, and your white Oakley sunglasses Dude – THINK before you speak it’s a new concept and remember “It’s better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt”
It’s “slave labour” to you…..to the people you call “slave labour” it’s a very well earning job. A job they WANT. You do them a dis-service with your western salary comparison.
If you normalize their salary to US minimum wage, they come out way ahead. So who is the real slaves. Minimum salary workers in the US or IPhone assemblers.