Apple's Streaming Service

[Anderton]

And here you go...a quick report from the Verge.

 

What I don't get is what's different about it...remember, Apple's supposed to "think different." I think the biggest element in their favor is inertia - people will buy an iPad, or iPhone, or whatever., sign up for the trial subscription, and then won't remember/won't care to turn it off.

 

If Apple really wanted to make a difference, it would become a creator of music, not a distributor...have an A&R department, and comb the earth for great acts worthy of the Apple label. Well, okay, maybe that name won't work...

 

We'll see.

[UstadKhanAli]

I dunno. We'll see.

 

The Siri integration could be cool.

[blue2blue]

Well, this is both an exciting time and a time of some bittersweetness; on the first, it's a sign of the seeming maturation of the notion of subscription streaming I've been a voluble fan of for most of a decade; on the bittersweet side, it's a long-predicted opportunity to perform a jig on the grave of Beats Music (the stream subscription arm of Beats Electronics, of course), which was the unfortunate and unlovable consequence of Beat's 2012 depredation of much-beloved but not-much-subscribed-to MOG.

 

When Beats bought MOG, according to a 2012 article in The Verge, the little-known (I found out about it via word of mouth in this very forum) MOG had 500,000 subscribers.

 

At the end of last year, according to USA Today, about 6 months after Apple bought Beats Electronics, with Apple top brass (barely mentioning the profitable headphone division but) gushing breathlessly about how Beats Music showed us the future of music and -- notably -- how they were putting the same team in charge of a wedding of Beats with iTunes, Beats Music had... [ wait for it ] ... 303,000 subscribers.

 

That's right, the future of music incarnate was such a dismal piece of crap (and it was, I did two extended trials) that Beats LOST two fifths of the subscriptions they got when they bought MOG.

 

Yet Apple put the same team in charge of the iTunes/Beats Music forced union.

 

 

That said, to answer Craig's question, here are two important things about the new service that set it apart from, if not other services, at least from the old and soon-to-be-abandoned-altogether Beats:

 

Unlike Beats, Apple Music has got a queue window and management system. In this, it's like virtually every other player, stream or file, that's ever existed on a computer or other smart device -- except Beats Music, which, utterly bizarrely, had no queue. You could play a specific track, or a playlist, or an album, but you couldn't see what was coming up next or rearrange the order of songs not-yet-played. The only way you could even play specific selections from a given album was by creating a playlist just for that use. As I hung out in the Beats customer/support boards, this was the ongoing, absolute, number one complaint. How could you make a player without a queue? It struck me as a real good question.

 

And, not a functional difference, but certainly a stylistic one, as I predicted the first day the Apple rumors floated, AM has been redesigned in Apple's signature white -- forsaking the dorky gamer-black UI that one supposes must have seemed so ghettolicious to Jimmy Iovine and team and going with a typical, gleaming white v-bezel framing relatively large graphics (in the phone version -- I haven't seen a screen shot of the desktop version yet).

 

 

Anyhow, Here's to the demise of Beats Music and better luck to Apple Music -- for the good of the nation -- because, of course, Apple is too big to fail.

 

[Anderton]

So basically, there really isn't any significant difference compared to most other streaming services...and it's being handled by a team that failed upwards. Not encouraging. However, I think Apple is the kind of company where unlike Microsoft, if something doesn't work they don't drop it - they go back and re-think. The MacBook Air is a good example of a product that came out of the gate as something okay, but in the next gen, became a whole lot better. Ditto the Mac Mini, and even OS X for that matter.

 

I'm plebeian enough that di.fm and tunein.com handle most of what I want anyway...

 

[blue2blue]

I actually meant to go on -- because there are two other aspects, a 'radio' station (singular, apparently) with curated playlists, and a social media component. Which does sort of sound like a reintroduction of iTunes Radio and the forgotten Ping, music-oriented social media service.

 

Wired's breathless coverage:

Second, it’s a radio station. It’s called Beats 1, has DJs in New York, LA, and London, and will be broadcasting to more than a hundred countries around the world. It’s anchored by Zane Lowe, the former BBC DJ that Apple hired earlier this year. Apple’s Jimmy Iovine, who announced the product on stage today, called it the first truly global radio station, and it will include music, interviews and more.

 

and...

 

Third, Apple Music is a sort of social network. It’s a little like MySpace, or what Apple always wanted Ping to be before it failed so miserably. It’s called Connect, and it gives artists a page where they can share music, behind-the-scenes photos and video, and basically anything else they want. It’s for artists new and old, and is an attempt to basically wrap Instagram, MySpace, and every other social network artists use into a single place.

[MikeRivers]

What I don't get is what's different about it...remember, Apple's supposed to "think different." I think the biggest element in their favor is inertia - people will buy an iPad, or iPhone, or whatever., sign up for the trial subscription, and then won't remember/won't care to turn it off.

 

Live DJs or at least live programmers - someone who's interested in the same kind of music that I am who listens to all the crap and picks out the good stuff for me to listen to.

 

I have a few radio stations that have an Internet stream in my WinAmp Bookmarks, and that's what I listen to. Free. Mostly good music, rarely bad music, at least according to my taste. But the bloom is starting to fade off the rose as more of these stations are either using imposed playlists (so we hear the same one song by an artist every day for two weeks before they appear in town for a show). Or they play all of their music from a computer so they don't play anything that hasn't already been loaded.

 

 

 

[blue2blue]

 

Live DJs or at least live programmers - someone who's interested in the same kind of music that I am who listens to all the crap and picks out the good stuff for me to listen to.

 

I have a few radio stations that have an Internet stream in my WinAmp Bookmarks, and that's what I listen to. Free. Mostly good music, rarely bad music, at least according to my taste. But the bloom is starting to fade off the rose as more of these stations are either using imposed playlists (so we hear the same one song by an artist every day for two weeks before they appear in town for a show). Or they play all of their music from a computer so they don't play anything that hasn't already been loaded.

 

 

 

Mike, my man, I hate to break this to you, but our beloved bluegrass, roots, and mountain music isn't probably even a blip on Apple's stream screen. Pretty sure we're talking 'curation' by hip hop and new pop DJs and (for some bizarre reason forgotten 90s niche figure) Trent Reznor. (I'm still curious how that last is gonna work out... now Nick Cave or Elvis Costello, those guys know their music history and have the kind of quirky, deep and wide reach that might make things interesting. Maybe Trent will surprise us. Happened once.)

 

 

Now, my questions: will there really be only one radio station (Beats One) with one stream? Will it be multi-genre? And will the DJ's actually be live -- or like most of the big market terrestrial radio industry, will it simply be a computer serving up pieces of music with some DJ chatter 'attached' robotically?

 

Or, like Beats, MOG, Google/Songza, and others before them, will it make a number of 'genre radio' stations and playlists available?

 

This latter seems most likely -- but I am intrigued by the notion of a sort of Apple-as-BBC single, central station model with live DJs (if that actually happens). It seems like it would dovetail nicely with Apple's presumed conception of their own vertical integration, yet another way to channel their user in various ways -- but I honestly don't think there's much in the way of unified musical tastes among Apple's base. Maybe they can change that with their awesome hypnotic powers...

[UstadKhanAli]

More on royalties for musicians:

"Music fans who have read about artists and record labels complaining about the tiny royalties they get from streaming services may have something to cheer about.

 

According to two people familiar with the matter, last-minute deal-making did result in a better streaming deal for record labels and artists.

 

Instead of sharing the industry-standard 55 percent of subscription streaming revenue with labels and artists, Apple will share around 58 to 60 percent. Music publishers in charge of songwriting royalties also saw a slight bump in their cut from the standard 10 to 12 percent to about 14 percent of subscription revenues, the people said. The people spoke on condition of anonymity because the deals are confidential."

 

http://news.yahoo.com/apple-music-brings-change-streaming-enough-070237533.html

 

[Geoff Grace]

I'm hardly a connoisseur of streaming music services, so I can't speak to how "different" Apple's will be. (In fact, I'm not so sure how different Apple will continue to be in general without Steve Jobs's vision and sense of aesthetics.)

 

I did see the keynote yesterday, however, and enjoyed the Siri integration. Siri was asked to perform a variety of tasks—such as creating a playlist of the top 10 alternative songs and playing the number one song of May, 1982—and "she" delivered.

 

Best,

 

Geoff

[Mandolin Picker]

 

Mike, my man, I hate to break this to you, but our beloved bluegrass, roots, and mountain music isn't probably even a blip on Apple's stream screen.

 

I would tend to agree. Everything I have seen says its all pop, as if that is all there is. Nothing wrong with pop, but there is other stuff out there.

 

In the end, streaming is really just radio, but using bits and bytes instead of radio frequencies. With all of the ways that the computer has allowed us to change music, why do we still mimic radio?

 

[Geoff Grace]

Radio and streaming have some notable differences—most significantly, pushed vs. pulled content.

 

While I'd generally rather pull content, there are times I prefer the experience of having content pushed at me—especially if I have similar taste to whomever's doing the pushing. If Beats 1 turns out to be anything at all like the best of FM radio in the '70s, I'll happily give it a listen.

 

Best,

 

Geoff

[MikeRivers]

 

Mike, my man, I hate to break this to you, but our beloved bluegrass, roots, and mountain music isn't probably even a blip on Apple's stream screen. Pretty sure we're talking 'curation' by hip hop and new pop DJs and (for some bizarre reason forgotten 90s niche figure) Trent Reznor. (I'm still curious how that last is gonna work out... now Nick Cave or Elvis Costello, those guys know their music history and have the kind of quirky, deep and wide reach that might make things interesting. Maybe Trent will surprise us. Happened once.)

 

I'm not the slightest bit interested in a radio station that plays primarily DJ and Hiphop music, no matter how well curated it is. Unless I decide to write a paper or article about that form of music. Then I'll look to masters who know their music history for that genre.

 

I don't just listen to Bluegrass Country, in fact that's a perfect example of the "playlist programming" that I was talking about. Jay Bruder and Dick Spottswood don't play the "bluegrass top 40" but in any two hour period any other time of the day, you can count on hearing the same three songs for about two weeks, then they take those out of rotation and stick a couple more in. Just like a commercial radio station that tries to make money. Community/non-profit radio needs money, too.

 

I can pull up WWOZ nearly any hour of the day or night and not hear repeats, and not hear enough of any kind of music song after song that I feel like turning it off. But I used to listen to The Caravan nearly every day on KBCS until I caught on that I was hearing the same songs every day for a couple of weeks (at least it's only a 3-hour show so they only play the "hits" once in the show) until the artis appeared in town, then they moved on to another artist to feature. It's no secret that they get some money from local venues, and I don't have a problem with that. If it wasn't for those venues, they'd have less local music.

[MikeRivers]

Instead of sharing the industry-standard 55 percent of subscription streaming revenue with labels and artists, Apple will share around 58 to 60 percent. Music publishers in charge of songwriting royalties also saw a slight bump in their cut from the standard 10 to 12 percent to about 14 percent of subscription revenues, the people said. The people spoke on condition of anonymity because the deals are confidential."

 

How generous! But what about the stories told like "My song had thirty bazillion streams last month and I got a check for $2.87?"

 

When people got a few of dollars, even split three or four ways, from the sale of each CD sold, they made some money. Sure, there were far fewer CDs sold than songs streamed, but it doesn't sound to me like they're making it up with volume.

 

 

[MikeRivers]

 

In the end, streaming is really just radio, but using bits and bytes instead of radio frequencies. With all of the ways that the computer has allowed us to change music, why do we still mimic radio?

 

Because it works, at least for the listeners. The reason to change is that it doesn't work for the advertisers, and that's what brings in the money. That club in Seattle where the pick artist of the week is playing isn't going to get any of my money because I'm 2500 miles away.

 

On XM (so I'm told - I'm not a listener there) they have the occasional artist tour calendar so if I hear someone I like, I might have an opportunity to see him in my town. But that's something that, if it's subsidized at all (yeah, sure it is) is paid for by the record companies. On Bluegrass Country, I hear about the band from North Carolina who are playing in Silver Spring and Baltimore - and so do the listeners in Japan and Finland.

[Anderton]

The plot thickens...Spotify has closed its latest round of financing, and Sweden's main carrier (Telia Sonera) is investing $115 million in return for a 1.4% stake in the company. If you do the math, that values Spotify at $8.2 billion dollars.

 

It will be interesting to see how Apple plays catch-up. I don't think they're used to being in that position, but I predict a battle royal will play out over the next 24 months.

[blue2blue]

 

I would tend to agree. Everything I have seen says its all pop, as if that is all there is. Nothing wrong with pop, but there is other stuff out there.

 

In the end, streaming is really just radio, but using bits and bytes instead of radio frequencies. With all of the ways that the computer has allowed us to change music, why do we still mimic radio?

 

Well, online 'radio' and streaming comes in a number of flavors -- there's the 'real thing,' which Mike likes, terrestrial broadcast stations with real DJs (sometimes, anyhow): stations like WAMU 88.5 (bluegrass), KKJZ (jazz), KCRW (pop); then there are 'affinity' stations like Pandora, Last.fm, and (I believe) the old iTunes radio; and after that you get into the straight on-demand, design your own playlists, play what you want, when you want model represented by Spotify, Google Music All Access, Rhapsody, Deezer, Tidal (There are also 'music lockers' like the free Google Music service, sans All Access, that nonetheless lets you upload up to 50,000 of your own tracks to their servers and use an iTunes Match-like system to avoid redundant storage [although with Google, you can actually force it to use your specific upload with a little extra work -- nice if you have an alternate master that gets matched with the wrong version or such, or if you're a stickler for fidelity and you're uploading FLACs but don't want them 'matched' to GM's standard 320 kbps streams. (320 is generally felt to be indistinguishable from full CD quality in practice, but GPM will handle FLACs (I'm not sure how gracefully it will handle above 44.1 kHz sample rates, however).

 

So that's a pretty wide range of types of service, from straight old school through Pandora free's might-hear-something-kind-of-like-what-you-want-to-hear, all the way to the (mostly) paid subscription on-demand services.

[blue2blue]

"I'm not the slightest bit interested in a radio station that plays primarily DJ and Hiphop music, no matter how well curated it is."

 

You barely even needed to tell me.

 

I really like WAMU (Bluegrass Country) quite a lot -- and it is a nice change to hear the DJs.

 

But my taste runs pretty far afield, too... you might be horrified by some of the cello-packing post-bluegrass outfits (like Crooked Still) or roots outfits (like the Everybodyfields) or just plain avant-who-knows types (like Abigail Washington) I find myself liking.

[UstadKhanAli]

 

How generous! But what about the stories told like "My song had thirty bazillion streams last month and I got a check for $2.87?"

 

When people got a few of dollars, even split three or four ways, from the sale of each CD sold, they made some money. Sure, there were far fewer CDs sold than songs streamed, but it doesn't sound to me like they're making it up with volume.

 

 

 

Haha! They're not throwing open the coffers. It's less horrible than other plans, apparently. But a little more than nothing is still...well, not much.

 

Music acts will still have to earn most of their money from touring, merch, etc., I'm sure.

[blue2blue]

 

How generous! But what about the stories told like "My song had thirty bazillion streams last month and I got a check for $2.87?"

 

When people got a few of dollars, even split three or four ways, from the sale of each CD sold, they made some money. Sure, there were far fewer CDs sold than songs streamed, but it doesn't sound to me like they're making it up with volume.

 

 

There are two things going on with those: first, there are two pay-outs in the US -- one to label/artist -- this tends to run from a half cent to over a cent per stream; the other, much smaller, to publishers/writers. (More below.)

 

It doesn't sound like much, but the Dillards Wheatstraw Suite has earned its label/artist rights holders over $24 in payouts from my plays alone since I signed up with Google's All Access a year ago February.

 

That's their share (based on the just under a penny that Google pays me for my plays currently). Obviously, that represents a lot of plays, something a little over 3 album plays a week (it's a morning wakeup thing). Other beneficiaries of my frequent play include the Anonymous Four (medieval vocal music performed by 4 women)... they've got a winning model for the streaming world: lots of very nice sounding, relatively short tracks, suitable for many occasions, meditation, etc. EVERY play they get increases their income.*

 

But the $.000000000000x horror stories (OK, I exaggerate on the zeros but I've seen some ludicrous and not strictly believable-at-face numbers) tend to come from two places: labeled artists who have signed at the 'sucker rate' of 10% royalty/share (or worse) or another low-end figure well below the up-to-50% share that big stars can demand; Take a Spotify single stream label/artist royalty of $.007 (to use a figure in the middle of the .006 to .0085 range frequently cited for their average payout rates [big labels have cut special deals with them, don't forget -- and like most big label deals, we're not privy to details], then take one TENTH of that and then split it four ways for your band... all of a sudden, instead of the $.007 a full indie solo artist might see per Spot stream, each member of the band is seeing 1/4 of the measly 10% the artist signed for -- $.007 / 10 = $.0007 and one fourth of that is $.000175...

 

Now, in addition to the label/artist royalty, publisher/songwriters have had their broadcast royalty rates set by the so-called Consent Decree courts since around WWII, the result of an antitrust suit against big publishers at the time.

 

Artists and labels, of course, in the US do not get paid anything for terrestrial radio play. But due to the that long ago decision (apparently likely to be revisited by the courts and/or legislators), publishers and writers have received a per-performance fee set by the rate courts based on what has been 'determined' to be the average number of listeners who hear a typical broadcast (set at 14,000).

 

When those 'Consent Decree' rates are applied to stream income, each stream is determined to be valued at 1/14,000th of the court-determined value of those conventional broadcasts -- and so the publisher/writer portion of subscription streaming looks very small, indeed, on a per-stream basis.

 

But those rates are determined by mechanisms outside the 'stream-o-sphere' (the rate courts). Still, it's worth noting that the courts have determined them to be equivalent, per listener, to the amounts paid for conventional terrestrial broadcast.

 

One thing for sure: the stream model tends to work best for artists who make music people actually listen to. If one represents the sort of artist where the album is purchased, listened to once a year and put away, it's going to be a long New Millennium. But for artists whose music gets played, the revenue adds up.

 

 

 

*There are shared income pool issues under, say, the Spotify model, since Spot shares out to rights holders just under 70 per cent of their pooled income for a given month. This is part of where the free Spotify advertising-driven tier comes in. As opposed to the 'income ceiling' represented by the monthly number of paid subscribers for pay-only services, there is no upper bound on advertising revenue; the more advertising sold, the more revenue to be shared across the pool -- right now, ad rates are relatively low since adoption of even free Spotify is relatively low (15 million paid and another 30 million free)... but, as streaming becomes more an accepted part of modern musical life, we might see a rise in ad rates and/or a greater tolerance for commercials; whether users would ever tolerated the more than half ads format of many commercial stations today is probably unlikely -- but people have been listening to such terrestrial stations for a long time and still continue.

[MikeRivers]

The plot thickens...Spotify has closed its latest round of financing, and Sweden's main carrier (Telia Sonera) is investing $115 million in return for a 1.4% stake in the company. If you do the math, that values Spotify at $8.2 billion dollars.

 

Thats like buying and selling radio stations, only the numbers are way bigger than they used to be. The owners and investors can make money, but what about the people who make their "product?"

 

 

[MikeRivers]

 

 

One thing for sure: the stream model tends to work best for artists who make music people actually listen to. If one represents the sort of artist where the album is purchased, listened to once a year and put away, it's going to be a long New Millennium. But for artists whose music gets played, the revenue adds up.

 

With all the music available all the time, how much do people actually listen? Even I, as a serious listener to certain kinds of music, when "listening" to the radio, can't tell you the name of the last song that was played.

 

Thing about album sales (I'm talking physical album here, or CD if you prefer) is that when it's sold, you get the money, allowing for some processing time. And you get royalties on 12 songs, not just one, regardless of whether the customer plays the whole album or puts it on the shelf after ripping a couple of songs to his iPhone.

 

 

 

 

[sventvkg]

And here you go...a quick report from the Verge.

 

What I don't get is what's different about it...remember, Apple's supposed to "think different." I think the biggest element in their favor is inertia - people will buy an iPad, or iPhone, or whatever., sign up for the trial subscription, and then won't remember/won't care to turn it off.

 

If Apple really wanted to make a difference, it would become a creator of music, not a distributor...have an A&R department, and comb the earth for great acts worthy of the Apple label. Well, okay, maybe that name won't work...

 

We'll see.

 

FAIL....No free Tier...No Steve Jobs...This company will falter.

[Anderton]

And the plot thickens even further. SoundCloud is now working with Merlin, an organization that represents over 20,000 independent labels like which works with labels like Ninja Tune, Warp, Domino, etc,. SoundCloud continues to move toward monetization (they started accepting advertising last summer). Interestingly, Sony, has started removing artists from the service; makes me wonder if they're working on something competitive.

[blue2blue]

 

With all the music available all the time, how much do people actually listen? Even I, as a serious listener to certain kinds of music, when "listening" to the radio, can't tell you the name of the last song that was played.

 

[...]

 

 

 

Well, I listen a lot (though that may not have been in question). My range of attention ranges from intense, full-album-order play, no distractions, to 'Where'd the music go?' when the queue ran dry 20 or 40 minutes before. Often, it is a matter of shifting focus. I am often doing other things, but I don't feel that automatically debases or decreases the value of the music.

 

With key exceptions (and Anonymous 4 just gave way to "I'll Fly Away," the lead track on Wheatstraw Suite), I don't tend to listen over and over. I do go through enthusiasms. This week maybe its Shane Nicholson and Casey Chambers (one of Oz's better Americana outfits, IMHO) but next it might be back to Gillian and David. The next it might be an excursion into jazz guitarist Bobby Broom.

 

Usually, around 1-3 times a day, I'll take a few minutes, poll my mood, and slide through hy albums, picking out anything from 3 or 4 to 12 or more. And, as the mood strikes me, I shuffle more in -- or clear the queue and start over

 

Oh... and I've consciously made a place for silence in my listening.

 

It started when I confronted my annoyance with the mastering on many classical albums. Depending on how you set your P's and Q's during mastering a CD version of an album might play with nicely considered use of silence in the all important 'passages' that mark transitions between movements. If you've ever seen a handful of over-enthusiastic audience members burst out in applause and bravos during what was supposed to be the silent, conductor-determined space between movements of a complete work, you may have some understanding of how important that space is.

 

Unfortunately, a 'compromise' that seemed to settle in for some time was to make CD's that had a decent flow using the PQ code track markers -- but also using those markers to truncate any silence beyond the end of signal. (A convenience for broadcasters is all I can figure.) This strategy means that when you play such an album from a hard drive or even from the disk drive in modern computers (older computers basically just had the audio components of a CD deck folded in; modern computers tend to 'rip on the fly' -- but that typically means the actual disk's 'meta-timing' which likely contains the 'artistic pauses' is lost.

 

So I created silent spacer vbr mp3sand uploaded them to my integrated 'music locker' so that I could insert the spaces into classical works I was afraid or knew would get pushed together. That got me past the all-but-deal-breaking sardining of movements in a full work. I have a 'playlist' with a number of 4 and 7 second 'spacer' tracks I just add that to the end of the queue with the full album already in it and then just slip them into place between movements. Typically, when I do so, I'll quickly safe it as a playlist to save a few seconds the next time. (My service, Google doesn't offer playlist folders [yet -- listening Google?] so I use 'alpha-numeric' tricks to impose some structure, using the fact that _ and - and some other characters show up at the top of alphanumeric lists.)

 

I also missed the 'stop-play-after-current-track' function found in the excellent personal player Foobar. So I created some longer silent tracks like 10 minutes, so I could insert a 'breather' in.

 

That way I don't have to either interrupt a track I'm enjoying or hang around waiting to hid stop at the very end.

 

And so those silent spacers are always easy to find I gave them a top-of-list artist name ("00 Silence") and track names that reflect the lengths. I also gave them a nice artist and album graphic in my library [sadly, personal music locker items can't be readily shared but maybe I'll release them as commercial tracks so they'll show up for everyone in the stream-o-sphere... can't foresee any problems with that... LOL... ]

 

Anyhow, Silence is golden.

 

 

 

 

[...]Thing about album sales (I'm talking physical album here, or CD if you prefer) is that when it's sold, you get the money, allowing for some processing time. And you get royalties on 12 songs, not just one, regardless of whether the customer plays the whole album or puts it on the shelf after ripping a couple of songs to his iPhone.

And, sure, that's great for some artists -- ESPECIALLY for the sort of of artists you buy an album of, listen once, maybe not even all the way through, and put at the back of the stack. When I went through my 1200 LPs/500 CDs/etc when I sold my house, the latter were, sadly, very well represented (particularly during the periods when money was flowing freely).

 

Unfortunately, that 'rewards' the people behind that unappealing, less-played music by awarding them more or less the same amount as those who make music people love and just can't stop playing.

 

And, of course, when an alternative exists that more directly rewards the arguable 'better' of marketplace entities, I think we know the flow of history. Markets have anomalies, to be sure, but when they are relatively free of manipulation, they tend toward rewarding perceived value.

 

 

Now that's a big plus for music consumers -- but the same iterative reward approach also provides benefits to artists that appear to have escaped many.

 

In the US, to the surprise of many Euros and others, not only do label/artists not receive any royalties for terrestrial radio broadcast (although publisher/songwriters do, largely because the publishers still had far more power when this stuff was last sorted in the 1930s and 1940), but used record store sales do not generate any revenue for artists (doctrine of 'first sale'). This is pretty deeply ingrained in the US's commercial psyche ['What?!? Make my favorite used bookseller pay royalties to Jacqueline Susann?"] and is highly unlikely to change.

 

Streams, on the other hand, can just keep paying the artist.

 

The key, of course, is to make music that people want to hear -- and hear again.

[MikeRivers]

Well, the model has changed from albums to singles and "make your own album." There have always been singles, and they always sold, but mostly they served as promos for album sales. So if you bought the single and later bought the album, you were making two royalty payments for the song (actually one for the other side of the single, too), and all of that adds up.