Apple music
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Apple Music announced on Thursday night (April 13) that Suga will be launching Agust D Radio in support of his debut solo album D-DAY.
“Set your alarms, #SUGA is coming to Apple Music Radio!” the streamer tweeted. “Get ready for the release of his debut solo album #D_DAY and tune in to #AgustDRadio weekly at 7PM PT Mondays / 11AM KST Tuesdays.”
The BTS member’s first radio show, titled “Ep. 1 Dream,” will premiere next Monday (April 17) just days ahead of D-DAY’s unveiling the following Friday (April 21) via BigHit Music. (For now, the themes of the five episodes to follow the full-length’s release remain a mystery to be revealed at a later date.)
ARMY from all across the world couldn’t hold back their excitement at the news, flooding the replies with tweets like “AgustD Radio and 5 eps ??? OH YESSS IM READY LETSGO” and “Yes! As an AM user for years and BTS fan and Yoongi biased, I appreciate it.” Others showed their dedication by vowing to listen to each episode even if they aired as early as 4 a.m. in their time zone, with one fan in particular declaring, “I WILL BE WAKING UP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT FOR YOONGI ONLY.”
In other BTS news, Suga was recently named an official ambassador for the NBA, a role that will play into his upcoming world tour for D-DAY. Meanwhile, the boy band’s traveling exhibition Proof is headed to Los Angeles to commemorate the septet’s 10-year anniversary as a group.
Check out Apple Music’s announcement of Agust D Radio below.
Even if classical music made up just 1% of U.S. music consumption in 2022, according to Luminate, Apple’s new streaming service dedicated to the genre could mean big things for the subscription market.
Global recorded music revenues rose for the eighth straight year in 2022 — but markets are maturing, and the once high-flying growth rate fell to single digits. That doesn’t mean the music subscription business is getting stale, though. In fact, there are plenty of new ideas and much-needed innovations that can help push the streaming market forward.
The latest, and one of the best, examples of how the music business can build a better mousetrap is Apple Music Classical. Apple wanted to better serve classical music fans but realized the best path was to break away from the Apple Music subscription app that works fine for every other genre. So, it built Apple Music Classical, a standalone app for Apple’s iOS devices — the Android app will arrive later — that launched on Tuesday to some rave reviews (GQ called it “a ton of fun”).
Classical music has always been a second-class citizen in digital music because of the way its metadata — information about the recording — is organized. For most genres, describing music by artist, track and album is an adequate way to organize a massive number of recordings. Download stores and streaming services are built around this classification system. But since the advent of iTunes and download purchases, people have recognized that classical music doesn’t fit well in the standard metadata system. In classical music, music is better organized by such categories as conductor, orchestra and movement. This could help explain why classical music accounted for 2.7% of U.S. digital album sales but just 0.8% of on-demand streams in the U.S. last year, according to Luminate.
“It’s the works-based nature of classical,” says Dart Music founder Chris McMurtry, now a vp at Pex, a digital music rights company. “That’s why Apple had to build a separate app.” McMurtry addressed that problem at Dart Music, a digital distributor that focused on classical music and built a database with metadata fields better suited for the genre.
Apple wasn’t the first company to see an opportunity in classical music. Dart Music launched in 2015 to tackle the metadata angle (its assets were acquired in 2017 by Haawk), and classical-focused streaming isn’t new, either. Idagio debuted in 2015. Primephonic launched in 2019 and was acquired by Apple in 2021. Universal Music Group’s Deutsche Grammophon imprint debuted its own service, Stage+, in 2022.
But Apple’s entry into the classical music streaming market could be the most impactful to date. Apple has billions of customers around the globe and an increasingly successful services business that includes the Apple Music subscription app and Apple TV+, a streaming video-on-demand platform. Those cloud-based services, combined with Apple’s bread-and-butter business of selling smartphones and laptops, give the company the resources and marketing might to activate a passionate group of music aficionados that has been underserved by streaming platforms better suited for rock, pop and hip-hop.
“It exceeded my expectations,” says McMurtry, who looked up well-known names and obscure composers to appreciate the app’s level of detail. He says he was impressed by the depth of metadata — the producers, engineers, mixers, other contributors, year of the recording and even the composers’ birth and death years. “It’s a very educational experience.”
If Apple Music Classical can hook McMurtry, maybe it can lure more people into the music subscription market. In 2022, there were 92 million subscribers to streaming services such as Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube Music, according to the RIAA. In total, 214 million Americans — 75% of the population 12 and older — streamed music in the past month, according to a January 2023 survey by Edison Research. Younger consumers were far more likely to stream music than older listeners, however, with 53% of people over the age of 55 having done so compared to 89% of 12-to-34-year-olds and 85% of 35-to-54-year-olds. A good classical music app can help narrow that sizable gap, attract more subscribers and generate more subscription revenue.
Going after classical music fans makes financial sense, too. For starters, they’re plentiful, says Russ Crupnick, partner at market research firm MusicWatch. “By comparison, they are somewhat larger than the entire population of vinyl buyers,” he says. As older consumers, they can afford a standalone classical music app: Crupnick says classical music fans’ mean income is 35% higher than average. They’re also twice as likely to purchase expensive, audiophile stereo equipment. When asked if obtaining the highest-quality sound format is important, 64% of classical music fans said yes, and 54% are willing to pay more to get it. Fortunately for them, Apple Music Classical is free of charge to Apple Music subscribers. “It will be interesting to see whether Apple eventually adds fees to monetize the service, or subsidizes it as they have higher resolution audio,” says Crupnick.
There’s great potential outside of the United States, too. Apple Music Classical will eventually be available in three strong markets for classical music: Japan, China and South Korea. In China, the fifth-largest recorded music market in 2022, according to the IFPI, classical music has been a phenomenon since the Cultural Revolution. Gramophone magazine described it as a “gargantuan market for the consumption of recorded classical music even if only as a study aid or as a residue of having Mozart and Beethoven sonatas tinkling through the family home.”
The digital market has performed incredibly well without a mass appeal offering tailored for classical music fans. Record labels generated $16.9 billion from streaming in 2022 while mostly ignoring an important subset of the market. With Apple Music Classical, Idagio and Stage+ super-serving classical music fans, there’s potential to do better.
Apple Music is ready for its long-awaited dive into classical music, with a standalone app. Announced Thursday (March 9), Apple Music Classical is pitched as the “ultimate classical experience,” and is said to be years in the making.
The app will invite classical fans to stream hundreds of curated playlists and thousands of exclusive albums, plus view exclusive artworks and digital portraits, browse composer biographies, editorial notes and more. AMC launches on March 28 but is available to “pre-order” now in the App Store.
Apple Music subscribers will be able download and use Apple Music Classical at no additional cost to their plan. While it’ll be a standalone app, only Apple Music subscribers will have access to it.
At launch, the service will boast the world’s “largest classical music catalog” with over 5 million tracks and works from new releases to recognized masterpieces, according to a statement.
The app’s search engine can locate recordings by composer, work, conductor, and even catalog number, and audiophiles will be rewarded with “thousands” of recordings rendered in immersive spatial audio.
Apple’s full-on plunge into classical follows the tech giant’s acquisition of Primephonic, the Netherlands-based classical music streaming service, in a deal announced back in Aug. 30, 2021, a precursor to the launch of a dedicated experience for classical music fans, which was tentatively planned for 2022.
“We love and have a deep respect for classical music, and Primephonic has become a fan favorite for classical enthusiasts,” Oliver Schusser, Apple’s vice president of Apple Music and Beats, said at the time. “Together, we’re bringing great new classical features to Apple Music, and in the near future, we’ll deliver a dedicated classical experience that will truly be the best in the world.”
That dedicated classical experience is set to go live later this month everywhere where Apple Music is offered, with the exception of China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan; those regions will follow at an unspecified date, reads a corporate statement. Also coming soon is Apple Music Classical for Android.
The app will be available for all iPhone models running iOS 15.4 or later.
Apple on Thursday posted its first quarterly revenue drop in nearly four years after pandemic-driven restrictions on its China factories curtailed sales of the latest iPhone during the holiday season. The company’s sales of $117 billion for the October-December period represented a 5% decline from the same time in the previous year, a deeper downturn than analysts had projected.
Despite the downturn — which marks Apple’s first year-over-year decrease in quarterly revenue since the January-March period in 2019 when sales also slipped 5% — the company’s Apple Services division actually set a new revenue record. The company said that combined, Apple TV+, Apple Music, Apple Arcade and others generated $20.8 billion for the three months ending Dec. 31, up from up from $19.5 billion a year earlier. Apple said that it now has more than 935 million paid subscriptions across its services, up from more than 900 million paid subscriptions reported in the previous quarter.
Apple’s profit also eroded during the past quarter, even though the Cupertino, California, company remained a pillar of prosperity. Earnings totaled $30 billion, or $1.88 per share, a 13 decrease from the same time in the previous year. Those results also missed a target of $1.94 per share set by analysts polled by FactSet Research.
Investors reacted to the letdown by initially driving down Apple’s stock by nearly 5% in Thursday’s extended trading. But management remarks made during a conference call with analysts raised hopes that Apple’s disappointing performance may have been a mere hiccup, paring the decrease in the company’s shares to less than 1%.
Apple’s rare stumble came against a backdrop of renewed investor optimism about tech’s outlook for this year, helping to spur a 17% increase in the sector’s bellwether Nasdaq composite index so far this year.
But now Wall Street seems likely to reassess things in light of Apple’s latest results and ongoing worries about a potential recession in the wake of rising interest rates aimed at tamping down inflation, said Investing.com analyst Jesse Cohen.
With Google also disclosing a year-over-year quarterly decline in its digital ad sales on Thursday alongside Apple’s disappointing performance, Cohen said it’s clear there are “several challenges the tech sector faces amid the current economic climate of slowing growth and elevated inflation.”
Despite the quarterly downturn in its fortunes. Apple hasn’t signaled any intention to resort to mass layoffs — a stark contrast to its peers in technology. Industry giants Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta Platforms have announced plans to jettison more than a combined 50,000 employees as they adjust to revenue slowdowns or downturns caused by people’s lessening dependence on the digital realm as the pandemic has eased.
“We manage for the long term,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told analysts during the conference call. “We invest in innovation and people.”
Cook had tried to brace investors for tougher sledding in late October when he warned of “increasingly difficult economic conditions” heading into the holiday season. Then, just a few days later, Apple cautioned that China’s attempts to clamp down on the spread of COVID was affecting its production lines and would prevent meeting all the demand for the premium iPhone 14 models during the holidays.
That contributed to an 8% decrease in iPhone sales from the previous year to $65.8 billion in the most recent quarter.
Cook indicated Apple’s supply headaches are now over, assuring analysts that “production is now back where we want it to be.”
In another positive sign, Apple also disclosed that it now has more than 2 billion iPhones, iPads, Macs and other devices in active use for the first time. That is likely to help Apple sell more digital subscriptions and ads, helping to fuel long-term revenue growth.
Apple Music announced Friday (Dec. 16) that Alicia Keys is bringing her first-ever Holiday Masquerade Ball to the streaming service later this month.
A trailer for the virtual event — which will stream Wednesday (Dec. 21) — shows the superstar performing a soulful cover of “Please Come Home for Christmas” on the Apple Music Live stage. “Bells will be ringing sad sad news/ Oh, what a Christmas to have the blues/ My baby is gone and I have no friends/ To wish me greetings once again/ Choirs be singing ‘Silent Night’/ Christmas carols by the candlelight,” she sings while pairing a bejeweled mask quite literally dripping in crystals with a sleek, tuxedo-inspired pantsuit.
With an assist from TikTok, the Masquerade Ball will feature music from Keys’ new holiday album, Santa Baby, and include appearances by JVKE and Jon Batiste.
“This is THEE Holiday party of the season,” Keys said in a statement. “I’m grateful to Apple Music and TikTok for helping me create a magic moment to showcase my first holiday album, in such a special way, for everyone around the world.”
Upon its November release exclusively on Apple Music and the iTunes Store, Santa Baby debuted in the top 20 on Billboard‘s Top Holiday Albums chart and has so far spent five weeks and counting on the tally. The studio set — a follow-up to 2021’s KEYS — was preceded by original holiday offering and lead single “December Back 2 June.”
Keys also stopped by Billboard‘s Pop Shop Podcast earlier this month to chat about the album, telling hosts Katie Atkinson and Keith Caufield, “It has a soulfulness, a rawness, it has that New York energy in it too, but it just feels like something you could play from top to bottom. And I recorded it like that; we recorded it very consistently over about seven days, and it all really feels cohesive and great. And so I love it. I think now is the time.”
Watch the trailer for Keys’ Holiday Masquerade Ball here.
Just two weeks after Spotify CEO Daniel Ek ripped Apple for “bullying” app owners in a Nov. 30 tweet thread, the executive doubled down on his comments during an interview that aired Thursday (Dec. 15) on the streamer’s For The Record podcast. During the appearance, Ek said Apple’s controls over payments and data on its app store create an anticompetitive environment that is “harmful for the economy and consumers.”
“They continue to give themselves unfair advantages really at every turn and setting themselves up as both the referee and player in this game,” stifling competition and hurting competitors and consumers, Ek said.
A vocal critic of the iPhone maker over the years, Ek has ramped up calls against Apple’s policies in recent months. The U.S. Senate has just weeks left in its current term to pass a bill that would rein in the control Apple and Alphabet Inc.’s Google exert over their apps marketplaces.
Introduced last year by Democratic Senators Amy Klobuchar and Richard Blumenthal along with Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn, the Open App Markets Act would block app store owners from requiring app developers to use its payments platform. The bill would also ban app stores from pushing their own products over competitors’ products and permit app developers to communicate more freely with customers and open the door to apps being downloadable from more platforms.
Speaking on the podcast, Senator Blackburn said the bill is gaining support daily.
“The reason we need this is to open up the marketplace to allow more competition, to allow developers to be able to take their product directly to the consumer,” which would lower some costs for developers at a time of high inflation in the U.S., Blackburn said.
App stores run by Apple and Google have traditionally taken a cut of in-app purchases. Prior to 2016, Spotify charged users 30% more if customers upgraded to a premium subscription inside Apple’s App Store to offset Apple’s 30% fee. To save on fees, Spotify has not allowed in-app purchasing on its Apple app since 2016.
Ek threw the weight of his company behind Blackburn’s bill on the podcast, saying that Spotify believes there needs to be regulation in this space to make clear that developers or companies can interact with consumers.
“There is an enormous concentration of power where one company here [is] dictating the rules for how millions of companies should be able to conduct business,” Ek said on the podcast.
This is not the first time Ek has taken on Apple’s App Store in the regulatory arena. In 2019, Spotify filed a complaint with the European Commission against Apple, alleging that rules governing its App Store “purposely limit choice and stifle innovation at the expense of the user experience — essentially acting as both a player and referee to deliberately disadvantage other app developers.”
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Not long ago, a placement on Spotify’s RapCaviar or Apple Music’s Today’s Hits playlists could ignite a single’s streaming numbers overnight. “Today’s Top Hits [32 million followers on Spotify] used to be the holy grail,” says one manager of several major-label acts. “Or even Pop Rising [2.7 million] — it was like, ‘If a song got on Pop Rising, it’s going to get to Today’s Top Hits and do 5 million streams a week.’ ”
But in 2022, the manager continues, “it doesn’t feel like that’s the case.” This realization is growing around the music industry. “The Spotify and Apple editorial playlists don’t have as much punch” as they did, agrees Kieron Donoghue, founder of Humble Angel Records and former vp of global playlists strategy at Warner Music Group. “The major streaming platforms are reacting to culture now rather than driving it,” adds Tatiana Cirisano, music industry analyst and consultant for MIDiA Research.
In a statement to Billboard, Sulinna Ong, global head of editorial at Spotify, countered that the platform’s “top five editorial playlists are followed by more than 80 million listeners — they’re wildly popular.” She added that the overall audience for playlists is larger than ever, “these listeners have increasingly diverse tastes, Spotify is meeting that consumer demand, and, as a result, more artists are being discovered.” A representative for Apple Music declined to comment for this story.
But managers sound nearly misty-eyed when they reminisce about the streams that some editorial playlists once generated. “There used to be a world where an unknown artist would get the cover of the Fresh Finds playlist [on Spotify] and they would get between 60,000 and 100,000 streams a week,” says one manager who works primarily with developing acts. “Now you’re looking at more like 15,000 to 20,000 streams a week.”
“Does Today’s Top Hits move the needle as much now as it did four years ago?” one senior label executive asks. “No.” The difference is especially stark, he adds, if you’re not near the top of the playlist.
Label executives say the change in firepower of marquee editorial playlists is caused in part by the increased emphasis on personalization, especially at Spotify, which encourages users to play music similar to what they’ve streamed — in essence, burrow deeper into their own tastes — rather than pushing all listeners to play the same tracks. The shift is also a reflection of the growing power of apps like TikTok in music discovery: “The pie of ‘discovery market share’ has become more fragmented,” according to Daniel Sander, chief commercial officer of music marketing technology company Feature.FM. The gatekeepers who program editorial playlists are ceding ground to user-generated content on short-form-video platforms.
There are exceptions: Managers say some of Spotify’s editorial playlists in Southeast Asia, for example, still have oomph, as does the phonk playlist, which launched earlier this year and caters to a rising subgenre of dance music popular in Eastern Europe. (Beneficiaries include dhruv, who has 7.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify, and Kordhell, with 12.7 million.) But executives maintain that many of the big-name editorial collections are not magnifying songs the way they once did.
Some of that decline is due to changes at the streaming services. In 2019, Spotify took playlists like Beast Mode and Chill Hits, which previously had been the same for all listeners, and personalized them “for each listener based on their particular taste,” according to a company press release. (This change did not affect playlists like RapCaviar, Baila Reggaeton, and Today’s Top Hits.)
Spotify found that this had two effects: Listeners tuned in to personalized collections for longer, and the streaming wealth was spread across more acts — raising “the number of artists featured on playlists by 30% and the number of songs listeners are discovering by 35%,” according to one 2021 announcement.
In her statement, Spotify’s Ong noted that “listener habits have become increasingly diverse, so our playlist strategy has expanded to accommodate that.” She says personalized editorial playlists are responsible for “a third of all new artist discoveries on Spotify.”
TikTok, which now spurs a lot of music discovery, embraced personalization from the beginning. Users marvel at how well the app seems to anticipate their tastes: “Everything on TikTok feels like it was meant especially for you,” says one music executive.
Short-form-video platforms like TikTok have also fundamentally altered the timeline of a hit. “With the rise of TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels, artists can play song snippets or behind-the-scenes content and drive fans to take action — discovery is happening before your song would even be able to be put on an editorial playlist,” says Sander.
In addition, TikTok rejuvenates catalog tracks — ranging from Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” (released in 1977) to Thundercat’s “Them Changes” (2017) — and pushes them back on to the charts, defying many marquee editorial playlists’ emphasis on front-line releases. “The path of a hit has changed,” says one major-label executive. The major streaming platforms “haven’t built anything to adjust to that.”
As a result, the power of streaming-service gatekeepers has eroded. “You’re going to find the next curator on TikTok,” says one A&R consultant at a major label. The mantle of the editorial playlisters has been taken up partly by remix-focused accounts on TikTok, which release sped-up or slowed-down versions of sounds that millions of users incorporate into their own videos.
User-generated content is “what’s driving TikTok and driving the charts,” says Kuok Meng Ru, CEO of music technology company BandLab. “People feeling involved gets them more excited.”
And there’s no way to be involved with editorial playlists other than hitting the “like” button. “We’re seeing in consumer surveys how much Gen Z really does want to actively participate in music — not just listen and consume passively, but make their own videos, remix the song, create their own content on top of it,” Cirisano adds. “The major streaming services don’t offer that.”
Apple Music users will soon be able to sing along to their favorite hits right inside the app.
On Tuesday (Dec. 6), Apple announced the launch of a built-in karaoke function on the streaming service, which will be available to all Apple Music subscribers worldwide later this month. Dubbed Apple Music Sing, the feature will be accessible on iPhone, iPad and the newest model of the Apple TV 4K, with tens of millions of songs available at launch.
Apple Music Sing is similar to a typical karaoke player, highlighting the streamer’s onscreen lyrics beat by beat. Additional functionality includes the option to adjust a song’s vocal levels; the separation of background vocals from main vocals to make the lyrics easier to follow; and a “duet view” that places lyrics from multiple vocalists on opposite sides of the screen to make multi-singer tracks easier to navigate.
Along with the new feature, Apple Music will additionally be launching a suite of more than 50 thematic Apple Music Sing playlists grouping songs together by genre, decade and more.
“Apple Music’s lyrics experience is consistently one of the most popular features on our service,” said Oliver Schusser, vp of Apple Music and Beats, in a statement on the launch. “We already know our users all over the world love to follow along to their favorite songs, so we wanted to evolve this offering even further to enable even more engagement around music through singing. It’s really a lot of fun, our customers are going to love it.”
Apple Music has released its revamped listening roundup, called Replay, which allows users to access a highlight reel of insights into their listening habits for 2022. This includes their total listening time, as well as their top songs, artists, albums, genres, playlists (both editorial and personal) and radio stations.
Released Tuesday (Nov. 29), Replay is rolling out with an updated color design and shareable assets for the top five of each user’s categories and will include a playlist of each user’s 100 most-played songs of the year. The most dedicated fans will also be clued in if they’re among the top 100 listeners for an individual artist or genre. Despite the fact that it rolls out before December hits, each user’s Replay will continue updating throughout the end of the year.
Apple has also released four year-end charts: Top 100 Global Songs, Top 100 Shazams, Top 100 Most-Read Lyrics and Top 100 Fitness Songs. The top songs for those respective playlists on the platform are The Kid LAROI and Justin Bieber’s “Stay”; Elton John & Dua Lipa’s “Cold Heart (PNAU Remix)”; “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” from the Encanto soundtrack; and Joel Corry’s “Head & Heart” feat. MNEK.
Among the Top 100 Songs, hip-hop still leads the way with 32 entries, though that’s down considerably from the 45 it had on that chart last year; with Apple surpassing 100 million tracks on its platform earlier this year, there is a more even distribution among genres than in years past. Pop came in second with 23 songs on the list, followed by R&B/Soul with 11, Latin with eight and J-Pop with six. Meanwhile, the top 10 Shazams list includes a number of African artists for the first time, including Rema (“Calm Down”) and Ckay (“Love Nwantiti”) in the top 10, while the lyrics chart includes four J-Pop songs. Perhaps predictably, the fitness songs chart was dominated by dance releases and remixes.
Earlier this month, Apple announced that Bad Bunny was its artist of the year, with his Un Verano Sin Ti the most-streamed album on its platform in 2022 and the most-streamed Latin album of all time. His ascension to that spot highlights the growing trend of non-English-language songs succeeding on the platform: overall, 21 non-English songs landed on the year-end Global Top 100, up from just nine last year.
The Ledger is a weekly newsletter about the economics of the music business sent to Billboard Pro subscribers. An abbreviated version of the newsletter is published online.
Apple Music’s recent subscription price increase and a likely forthcoming price hike by Spotify would provide a boost to U.S. and global music revenues and likewise impact catalog valuations.
Higher prices for Apple Music and Spotify’s individual plan could be worth hundreds of millions in additional subscription revenue annually in the U.S. Incremental revenues resulting from these price increases have the potential to reach roughly $650 million a year for streaming services. That assumes 7% growth in subscribers in 2023, no additional churn, a full year of higher prices and higher prices for both self-paid and promotional subscription plans.
However, a small amount of churn is possible, and Spotify is unlikely to raise rates at the beginning of the year. Additionally, not all subscription plans are subject to increase. (Apple is not raising the price on Apple Music Voice, for example.) Thus, the actual impact is likely to be lower next year and in successive years.
Apple Music’s individual plans rose $1 from $9.99 to $10.99 per month, while its family plan price increased $2 from $14.99 to $16.99. Apple One, a bundle that includes Apple Music, Apple TV+ and other services, rose $2 for the individual plan and $3 for the family plan (which includes Apple Arcade and iCloud+) and premier plan (which adds Apple News+ and Apple Fitness+).
Spotify could follow with similar price increases in the U.S. of $1 per individual subscription, though it may not further raise its family plan price on top of the $1 increase, to $15.99, that it imposed in April. Spotify also has discounted plans for students that cost $4.99 per month. For these purposes, Billboard assumes those discounted plans will remain untouched.
Creators and rights owners effectively get a raise from a price increase. The same percentage of streaming services’ revenue would flow as royalties to labels and publishers. Higher prices wouldn’t impact listening habits — although some churn is possible — so the math is favorable to creators and rights owners: a larger royalty pool would be divided by the same number of streams to calculate the per-stream royalty owed to each track.
Higher rates from the two largest subscription services in the U.S. would make songwriting and recording catalogs more valuable, too. Price increases will add revenues to a catalog’s existing royalty income, and streaming growth has been positively correlated with higher valuations of music catalogs. As Billboard reported this week, a new paper by New York University professor Larry Miller found that streaming accounted for 62% of the average multiple paid for songwriting catalogs in 2021.
Spotify has not announced a broad price increase on its individual and family plan subscriptions, but CEO Daniel Ek signaled the company would likely follow Apple Music’s lead when speaking to investors during Spotify’s Oct. 25 earnings call. A U.S. price increase “is one of the things we would like to do,” Ek told investors, adding Spotify will have conversations with labels “in light of these recent developments with our label partners.”
Expect higher prices to become the norm. Amazon Music Unlimited raised its prices in May. Deezer raised its subscription prices in France, its largest market, in January and plans rate hikes in Germany and the U.S. in December. Apple Music’s decision to raise prices “opens the door for further price increases down the line,” Deezer CEO Jeronimo Folgueira said during its Oct. 28 earnings call. Exactly how much incremental revenue these price hikes will generate depends on many variables. In any case, creators and rights owners can expect more subscription royalties in 2023 and beyond.