State Champ Radio Apple music
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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.
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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.
Apple services, the category which encompasses Apple TV+ and Apple Music, saw another slight drop in revenue during the fourth fiscal quarter ending in September.
The category generated $19.2 billion in revenue, down slightly from the $19.6 billion reported during the third fiscal quarter ending in June — a figure that was another decline compared to the record $19.8 billion in sales the services collectively generated during the second quarter. But compared to the previous year, Apple’s FY Q4 services revenue represented a five percent year-over-year increase.
Apple now has more than 900 million paid subscriptions, up from the 860 million reported during Q3, according to Apple CEO Tim Cook.
Accounting for the tech giant’s product sales, Apple brought in $90.1 billion during the quarter — a quarterly record for the company driven by continued iPhone sales. “Our record September quarter results continue to demonstrate our ability to execute effectively in spite of a challenging and volatile macroeconomic backdrop,” Apple CFO Luca Maestri said in announcing the results.
The company’s earnings report comes just days after Apple instituted price hikes across Apple TV+, Apple Music and the Apple One subscription bundle. Apple TV+ — home to Ted Lasso and Severance — now costs $6.99 per month, compared to the $4.99 per month price point the service has maintained since its 2019 launch, while the annual plan for Apple TV+ now costs $69, compared to $49.
Speaking with analysts on the company’s earnings call, Cook said the increased price for Apple TV+ was a reflection of the increase in content available on the streamer. “We’re very focused on originals only, and so we had four or five shows or so in the beginning and priced it quite low,” he said. “We now have a lot more content and are coming out with more each and every month, and so we we increase the price to represent the value of the service.”
Apple Music subscriptions now start at $10.99, making it more expensive than Spotify, while the family plan costs $16.99 per month and the annual plan costs $109.
Apple also quietly updated its App Store rules to require iOS publishers to give the company a 30 percent cut for any boosted, or sponsored, posts purchased within their respective apps. The move has frustrated platforms like Meta, which sells sponsored posts.
This article was originally posted on THR.com.
Universal Music Group, Hipgnosis Songs Fund and other music stocks got a much-needed boost on Tuesday (Oct. 25) following news of Apple Music’s price hike, as investors bet it would trigger a wave of streaming subscription cost increases.
Universal Music Group’s stock closed 11.6% higher, Hipgnosis Songs Fund Ltd ended up 7.8% and Korean music companies SM Entertainment and HYBE finished the trading day 4.8% and 4.4% higher, respectfully, on Tuesday. On Monday, Apple announced that it was raising the standard U.S. and U.K. individual plan price to $10.99 from $9.99.
This 10% price hike — Apple’s first — comes amid high inflation and a darkening economic environment in many global markets. If Apple can raise prices at a time like this, that is a sign the music industry can charge more without turning off consumers, Wall Street analysts said.
“We see this as a further signal of the stickiness of music streaming subscriptions even in a weaker macro environment and believe the major markets will be able to absorb higher prices without leading to meaningfully higher churn,” Lisa Yang, Goldman Sachs’s head of European media & internet technology equity research, wrote in a note to investors on Tuesday.
“We believe that other major DSPs will likely follow suit with similar price increases in the near future, implying further potential upside to our music industry forecasts.”
Competitors Spotify and Amazon Music have already raised prices in some markets. Amazon Music raised the price of its unlimited individual plan for Prime members to $8.99 from $7.99 earlier this year.
Spotify, which will report earnings later Tuesday, raised the cost of its individual plans in the Nordics in 2021, although its standard plan for U.S. subscribers remains at $9.99.
“Despite positive management commentary around churn (with regards to recent price increases on certain plans/regions) as well as management’s views on pricing power over the long term, Spotify has highlighted the broader macro environment as a key consideration in terms of implementing price increases in the near term,” Yang wrote.
Apple’s price increase could also have positive impacts on the majors because companies like UMG and Warner Music Group typically get 65% of music-related revenues from streaming companies with a “high incremental margin,” Goldman estimates.
Music stocks have suffered in 2022 as the major U.S. market indices have fallen around 20% so far this year.
UMG’s share price of 21.10 EUR ($21.01 US) is down nearly 14% year to date, Hipngosis Songs Fund Ltd traded at 91.06 penny sterling ($1.03 US) and is down 28% so far this year. Meanwhile, Warner Music Group’s stock traded at $27.16 US, off almost 37% year to date.
