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French indies add voice to Apple Music criticism
By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 19 June 2015
Do you remember the days before the Apple Music controversy? They were simpler times. I think we all laughed more. You could leave your door unlocked. People spoke to their neighbours. We all sang along to ‘Top Of The Pops’ each week. They were happy days. But those days are long gone, people. And so, here we go again, with another CMU Daily story on the Apple Music controversy.
And today it’s the French indie label community adding its voice to the debate, backing their counterparts in the UK, US and Germany in criticising the licensing deal Apple is proposing to the labels for its new streaming service. Says the UPFI: “Nous prenons la liberté d’écrire aujourd’hui aux dirigeants d’Apple pour leur faire part de notre insatisfaction profonde concernant les conditions de lancement de leur nouveau service de musique en stream au plan mondial”.
You got that, right? You do know you need to be fluent in at least two languages to be a CMU reader?
Well, like the other indie label trade groups, the UPFI says that, while its members welcome Apple’s move into streaming, they feel the licensing negotiations for the new service have been unnecessarily rushed, which is a fair complaint given Apple Music has been in development for at least a year, and yet conversations with the indies seem to have begun very late in the day, now that a launch date has been set. This suggests, the UPFI says, that Apple “intends to impose its terms without the possibility of real negotiation”.
The key point of contention, of course, is that Apple doesn’t want to pay any royalties at all during the three month free trial period it will offer consumers, and which all users will be on between July and September this year.
This, says UPFI, “may cause a considerable loss of income for labels who rely primarily on new releases, especially if they have a key release during the free period”. Apple knows the tricky economics of being an indie label, the trade group adds, while the labels know the huge wealth the tech firm commands. And yet Apple is, it reckons, “expecting the label community to finance the marketing of its new service”.
So there you go. “But what does Taylor Swift make of all this?” some of you are now asking. The same some of you who needed the French translating, I bet. This is why I have to lock my door at night. Well, word has it famous Spotify-foe Swifty will make her catalogue available on the no-freemium-level-here-thanks-very-much Apple Music, but her new album won’t be there at launch when the new service will have the free-trial-that-makes-it-sort-of-freemium thing going on. So make of that what you will.
Meanwhile, for those of you still musing that all important question we asked back in early May, well, given this week’s developments we’ve done the math and can reveal our findings right here.
