Is Streaming Finally Coming To iTunes?

The rumors have been running rampant over the web the last few days regarding the upcoming changes to iTunes, which seem to have been leaked out of Cupertino.

According to the leaks, Apple will overhaul its iTunes music store by the end of the year. The revamp will reported include more integration with the company's iCloud storage service, and its ill-conceived Ping music social network will get the axe. In Ping's place will come closer integration of Facebook via the upcoming iOS6.


Apparently Apple has also been in talks with all the major labels. While some say it's over the ability for iTunes users to increase song sharing via iCloud, others say that it might be over the long-awaited subscription service that could be built into iTunes.


Whatever Apple is planning, it appears to be a key in iTunes expansion into Asia, which just added 12 new countries (Brunai, Cambodia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, Laos, Macau, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Vietnam).


Another quiet release was the new stand-alone iTunes Podcast app, which includes a host of new features dedicated to creating and listening to podcasts.


As I've said all along, an iTunes subscription service would set the music business on its ear and completely change the playing field for how labels, artists and publishers get paid. Let's see if it comes sooner than later.

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You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

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Online Music Store Showdown

Now that Google Music has finally officially launched on the back of iCloud, we can finally get down to the business of the online music business. Here's a chart form Huffpost Tech that outlines the features of the big 3 online music stores: Amazon MP3, iTunes and Google Music.

Who will win? I think that in the near future, iTunes will be hard to beat, but their market share will erode with time as Google Music gains some traction. Plus you can't beat the fact that they're the only one with an easy to use desktop app (which is what iTunes rally is - the front end to the digital music store).

We'll revisit this chart in a few months when the numbers are in to see how they stack up against each other market-share wise.

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You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

Google Music Finally Launches

After months of public beta, Google Music has finally launched. For those of you who aren't familiar with it yet, Google Music is the big G's version of iCloud, which is a cloud-based locker for storing your music online and accessing it from any device at any time. While it's too early to have many definitive impressions, here's what we know so far.

1) When Google Music launched in beta earlier this year, it had exactly zero licenses from the major labels, a fact that didn't make negotiating with them afterwards none too easy. That said, GM officially launched with agreements from Universal Music Group, EMI, and at the last minute, Sony Music, as well as a host of independents. It's probably only a matter of time until Warner Music falls in line as well. I haven't heard what the license fees were yet, but regardless the amount paid, you can bet that most artists won't see much of it. The Google Music store will start off with about 13 million songs available.

2) It's free to the end-user for up to 20,000 songs, which should satisfy the music collections of the vast majority of users (that's about 2,000 albums worth).

3) Their "Artist Hub" section of the service allows anyone to directly upload, manage, and sell music without the need for a middleman like Tuncore or CDBaby. They say they'll pay artists 70% of the sale price and only charge a one-time upfront fee of $25.

 4) T-Mobile customers will soon be able to pay for their music purchases directly through their phone bills, as they currently can with purchases from the Android Market. This is something that the music industry has wanted for ages.

5) Users will be able to put iTunes music into their music lockers, and the Google Music Manager is even supposed to retain users’ playlists and ratings.

6) As you would expect, Google+ is connected to Google Music, making it easy to share songs and playlists either publicly or with select groups of friends through the network’s Circles feature.

Out of all of these points, I think that the Artist Hub is a big deal and it should be interesting to see if iTunes follows with something similar. Right now you pretty much need an aggregatorlike Tunecore to get your songs on iTunes and it takes some time for that to happen. Let's see if Google Music has streamlined the process any.

We'll keep an eye on Google Music in the coming days and report any new info that we find.

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You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

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A Cloud Service Comparison

Now that iCloud has been launched, we can now take a good hard look at what it offers, as well as some alternatives. Below is a chart that looks at the three major cloud services for data storage only.

Below is a comparison chart for the three major cloud music services.

As you can see, in both data and music storage, iCloud looks like it's a pretty good deal. iTunes match is particularly cool in that it automatically transfer the songs you bought on iTunes to your cloud partition, as well as any other songs it can identify. That feature hasn't launched yet, but we're told it should be available soon.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Apple's Latest Music Announcements

Apple's press conference today didn't introduce the iPhone 5 like everyone was anticipating, and the general feeling was that it was underwhelming in terms of product announcements. If you look underneath the surface of the event though, it wasn't really about product at all. This was more for the investment community and developers to let them know that Apple was still in good hands and there was truly some continuity from Steve Jobs to Tim Cook as the guiding light of the company.

That said, there were a few announcements that did affect the music industry. First was the official introduction of iCloud, which officially launches on October 12th. According to Apple, fully a third of all music sold on iTunes store is purchased on iOS devices, so iCloud is an important tool for the future of that ecosystem. As we were lead to believe, songs purchased via iPhone or iPad on iTunes will automatically be downloaded to a user's Mac for no additional charge.

And finally, some real details on iTunes Match, which launches at the end of October as well. With over 20 million songs, Apple claimes that iTunes is the largest music store in the world, which becomes an important piece to Match. Match "scans and matches your library against our 20M songs we’ll upload. What we don’t find, we’ll stream,” according to Apple's Eddie Cue. The operative word here is "stream." The price is $24.99 per year. Worth it? We'll see, although it seems to be a no brainer at the moment.

Finally, news about the death of iPod are extremely premature apparently. Apple introduced a new iPod Nano with a modified touch screen and a new clock face that also measures walking and running sessions, and a new iPod Touch and Shuffle were also introduced. It seems there's some life left in those Pod's, and the digital files in your life, yet.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

5 Features Missing From Facebook Music

Facebook Music has awaited with almost as much anticipation as Apple's iCloud (which we'll probably see this week). Now that it's finally here and we've got a chance to look at it, it appears there are a few things missing. Here's a piece of a great article from CNN.com regarding the 5 features missing from Facebook Music. For me, number 4 is the big one. You can read the entire article here.

"1. True music sharing
We're not saying it would be easy, but if Facebook really wants to help people listen to each other's music, it should let them do so using whatever music service they want. True, Facebook has started down the road of universally translating between music services, so that I can hear your songs even if you use Rhapsody and I use MOG -- but so far, it has done so by tilting the playing field favorably (some would say unfairly) towards Spotify.
If Facebook really wants to offer "frictionless" music sharing, to borrow Zuck's oft-repeated phrase, it will let people listen to shared stuff using whatever they want, rather than the same service used by the sharer.

2. Real-time group listening
A Facebook employee deleted a tweet about it, but Evolver.fm has confirmed that at least two streaming radio services plan to implement it. Slacker, specifically, says it has been working with Facebook to do so for months. So why didn't Facebook Music launch with the ability to join other listeners on a station in real-time, so that people can chat about what they're hearing a la Turntable.fm? This will probably be the neatest thing about Facebook Music, and even after yesterday's presentation, it's 100% vaporware.

3. Music tab in the ticker
Facebook is now more cluttered than ever, which, according to hilarious Wired.com pundit Lore Sjöberg, is because Facebook finds it beneficial to keep its users dissatisfied while offering them a forum where they can express that dissatisfaction -- just like the Democratic Party.
Zuckerberg kept using the word "lightweight" to describe the new Ticker on the right side of Facebook, but accusations of clutter are not without merit. So why not add a music filter? As a music fan, I'm mainly interested in what people are listening to, Ticker-wise. I don't care about who my friends have friended. The Facebook Ticker should offer a way to look only at music activity, and there's no good reason for it not to.

4. Apple
As Matt Rosoff of Business Insider observed, the white elephant not in the room at f8 yesterday was Apple, iTunes, and iCloud. Apple would need to swallow some pride in order to join Facebook's music ecosystem, but maybe it should.
Some argue that Apple only ever sold music in order to sell more iPods and iPhones anyway. Now that it can sell apps for other music services, and run those on its devices, perhaps Apple is no longer concerned about selling music. From a user perspective, it would be nice if iTunes activity were included in Facebook's music activities. Last.fm scrobbles from iTunes, so why can't Facebook? Maybe this one will happen when Apple takes the wraps off of iCloud later this year.

5. Independent developers
For this one, Facebook's off the hook for the most part -- it just needs to stay out of the way.
One of the neatest things about Rdio and now Spotify is that they let independent app developers build third-party players atop their catalogs. If I subscribe to either service, I can use any music app that taps into it, offering a potentially huge range of interfaces, platforms, designs, features, etc. to choose from -- more than Rdio or Spotify could ever develop on their own.
WIRED: Facebook's gone rogue -- it's time for an open alternative
If someone wants to build a music player that lets people choose what to play by rolling virtual dice, slaying a dragon, wandering through a 3-D library, or whatever, on any platform, I can use that interface to play Rdio's or Spotify's music.
This is already starting to happen -- and unless Facebook somehow gets in the way, all of the music played in these third-party apps should appear on Facebook. In fact, Facebook could even encourage this sort of thing."

 Let's see what happens at Apple's press conference tomorrow. iCloud, anyone?

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You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for daily discussion of music, recording, and production tips and tricks.

Spotify Is A Hit So Far

Despite some different numbers from different sources, it looks like Spotify has found an audience, at least in the early going. While Billboardbiz.com estimates that the music service, which launched on July 14th, has amassed at least one million total users in just three weeks, AppData claims the total is closer to 2.1 million total users.

Either of these are impressive stats, but the most important figure is 70,000. That's the number of paying subscribers to Spotify after only the first week that it was available in the US.

Some see paid subscription like this as the savior of the music biz, while others see it as just another boulder pulling it down. On the one hand, if there are enough paid subscribers, the music business could be considered healthy again. A round number thrown about is 100 million at $10 per month, which comes out to $12 billion a year. While this might be great for the major labels, it's yet to be determined just how much of that the artists, publishers, and indies will see. If history holds true, it will be a pittance as always.

Spotify expects to have 50 million users in the US within an year. How many of those will be subscribers? If today's numbers stay on course that only amounts to 3.5 million users, well below projected 100 million. Then again, if Apple supplements its soon to be launched iCloud with some sort of streaming subscription service, those numbers just may be within reach.

Once again, this is still probably not great news for the artist, since the streaming royalty rate is so small ($.0012 - or about a tenth of a cent per stream) that an artist with a giant hit may only expect enough money to buy a nice dinner, if that. Another example of Music 3.0, and why an artist's supplemental income is so important.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for daily discussion of music, recording, and production tips and tricks.

The Big Money Artists Won't See

If you're signed to a major label you already know how hard it is to get paid, and how much harder it is to get what you're owed. It's in the DNA of labels to find every reason not to pay you, but I bet you thought you'd get a nice payday when you heard that Apple paid the majors a $150 million license fee for iCloud or then Spotify also made a large deal as well.

Here's the sad truth. Record labels only pay royalties on sales. A blanket license deal like Apple and Spotify just paid is not seen as a sale, so all of that money goes to the bottom line of the label, and none towards the artists.

How about the extra money generated by the yearly subscription fee to iCloud? Not a sale, so no royalties. How about from the Amazon and Google cloud services? They never signed a license agreement and paid any money in the first place, so no royalties.

Still want to sign with (or be signed to) a major label?

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for daily discussion of music, recording, and production tips and tricks.

Comparing The Music Services

My buddy Gary Myer sent me this chart the other day. It's from an LA Times article about the competition that Spotify will have when it's finally able to operate in the US. As you can see, one of the things that both Spotify and Rdio have going for them is the fact that they have your music available in the cloud and on-demand at any time, plus streaming radio service. The downside is that they're subscription services that charge you a monthly fee to listen on your computer, and about double the normal fee to add mobile access as well. iCloud will be a single charge per year.

Will this make a difference to the consumer? Will iCloud add radio streaming (don't see why not as you can get it with iTunes now)? I guess we'll have to wait until both Spotify and iCloud are available to actually see.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for daily discussion of music, recording, and production tips and tricks.