Jimmy Iovine’s tenure as leader of Apple Music appears to have come to an end.
Apple promoted Oliver Schusser to be the new head of Apple Music Worldwide. The move comes right after the streaming service hit the 40 million subscriber mark.
Things happen in cycles, and portable music is no exception. After records, tapes and CDs came the iPod. The iPod shuffle took the form of a small, screenless clicker. With the dawn of streaming services, portable music storage became less relevant — or so we thought.
Spotfiy has managed to negotiate a reduced royalty rate with Sony Music Entertainment, and is also in talks with Warner Music Group, claims a new report.
In return, Spotify will reportedly hold back albums to paying subscribers for two weeks before making them available to customers on Spotify’s free tier. A similar multi-year deal was agreed with Vivendi’s Universal Music Group earlier this year.
Tesla is considering launching its own streaming music service, and it’s already in talks with players in the music industry about doing so.
According to a new report, Tesla has held conversations with all the major music labels about launching its service — which would come bundled with its cars, as opposed to being a standalone service like Apple Music.
Apple should take a note out of Jeff Bezos’ playbook and launch an Amazon Prime-style subscription service, claims an analyst for Goldman Sachs.
“We think Apple should launch a subscription bundle as a way to reinforce iPhone loyalty and leverage it into content,” Simona Jankowski writes in a new note to clients. In the brief, Jankowski and colleagues ponder the potential of a $50 monthly subscription that would get customers the latest iPhone plus other services like Apple TV, Apple Music and freemium access to the iTunes library.
Apple Music and Spotify have started offering users access to unofficial, user-uploaded music remixes, courtesy of a deal with Dubset Media Holdings.
The company uses algorithms to sort out licensing and royalty payments for musical remixes. It’s an incredibly complicated problem to tackle, since a single remix might have upward of 600 different rights holders.
Apple Music is having a big impact on the profitability of the music industry, according to a new report from the Recording Industry Association of America.
How big? Apple Music is one of the key players driving what looks to be the recording industry’s first back-to-back yearly growth since 1998-1999.
Jay Z and Apple aren’t going to be joining forces anytime soon, according to Apple Music head honcho Jimmy Iovine.
In a new interview, Iovine poured cold water on Tidal takeover rumors, saying: “We’re really running our own race” and “we’re not looking to acquire any streaming services.”
Apple Music doesn’t appear to be slowing Spotify’s growth at all, based on the number of paid subscribers the rival streaming service has added in 2016.
During the iPhone 7 event, Apple boasted that it has 17 million paid subscribers. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek fired shots back on Twitter this morning, revealing his company has more than twice as many paid music listeners.
Negotiations between music streaming service Spotify and all three major record labels have hit a snag lately and Apple Music is a big reason why.
Spotify’s licensing agreements with Sony, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group have reportedly been on a rolling month-by-month basis for much of 2016, yet the companies haven’t been able to hammer out long-term deals yet because Spotify isn’t willing to share as much revenue as Apple Music.
