Apple Establishes New Streaming Deal With Warner Music Group, Will Pay Lower Rates

Awesome news. Greedy artists are getting paid way too much for making content. Only the management and infrastructure people should be entitled to profit.

That's wondeful, content creator make even less while Apple makes even more money.

So let's be realistic here for a second. None of this is going to be passed on to the customer and will result in artist being payed less. Then we will have a bunch of artist pulling their music from streaming services.

And yet none of them have been successful without streaming. Sorry, but streaming is the norm now. It would be like refusing to be played on the radio back in the '80s or '90s. You simply couldn't have become successful without it. Every industry has their necessary evils.

Artists use to take more profits from their albums. Now they're only paid for the songs which are played. This can still make them insane money. More than they would have selling albums, as now you don't just get paid 1 time but every time someone listens to a song.

But they're also realizing they need to do more if they want the mega-millions to roll in. Touring is becoming a bigger part of how the big acts make money. I don't see anyone complaining that streaming is causing their favorite artist to come to town more often.

The big names now even richer than ever before. Streaming isn't hurting them. And the truth is the smaller acts never saw huge album sales before anyways. The current state of streaming opens those small guys up to people who would never have paid to check out their album but are now paying them by listening to their songs. In this way it has spread the wealth across more small acts than in the past. On average people are listening to more than double the number of artist they did 10 years ago, and that's great for the music industry.

So let's be realistic here for a second. None of this is going to be passed on to the customer and will result in artist being payed less. Then we will have a bunch of artist pulling their music from streaming services.

I guess this means less subscription money spent paying music labels and more money spent making carpool karaoke episodes?

Cool! I'm looking forward to them passing on the savings!

oh...

Cool! I'm looking forward to them passing on the profits in dividends!

Awesome news. Greedy artists are getting paid way too much for making content. Only the management and infrastructure people should be entitled to profit.

This is nothing new.

If you sign a record contract... you're lucky to get 10%

The other 90% goes to the labels, marketing, management, producers, songwriters, etc.

If you think that's unfair... then you shouldn't have signed a record deal in the first place! :P

The next headline I want to read is that due to lower fees to record studios, Apple Music will cost less.

No? Not happening? Well who gets that extra money now?

Where's Taylor Swift during this darkest hour?

Must not be controversial enough this time to stage a publicity stunt over.

Havent you heard? The old Taylor is dead

Sorry if facts hurt those who so blindly devoted to Apple

If you think that the problem is whether Apple (and other streaming services) pay out 58% or 55% of revenue in royalties and not the 90% take the labels keep (97.5% by the time you factor in RIAA accounting rules) or policies such as breakage fees (originating with vinyl records that broke in transit but continued into CDs and even digital download eras) or opaque practices of handling royalty advance overages from the streaming services then only one of us is "blind." Record label contracts and accounting are crazy. Record labels need to go the way of the dinosaurs. Better equipment for home studios reduced the need for a label's support in production. Apple and companies like them, first with iTunes and now Apple Music, are doing the same with distribution (albeit with Indie aggregators). As online tools (including discovery services in those streaming services) and communities get better for promotion hopefully we can finally say goodbye to labels.