Michal Marek Today, there are quite a few music streaming services in the world that allow the user to listen to any music they want, for a price of up to 200 crowns per month. However, Apple would like the price to drop even further in the future. According to the latest reports, Apple is negotiating with major publishing companies and trying to agree with them better terms, lower prices and new options and functions for the music service Beats Music, which Cupertino acquired through this year's acquisition.
According to server resources Re / code negotiations are only at an early stage, and Apple will apparently not intervene in the current running of Beats Music this year. Last month, however, representatives of the Apple server TechCrunch they communicated that their news about the planned cancellation of Beats Music in favor of a proprietary solution are not true. So it can be expected that this music service will continue to work and Apple will try to develop it further. However, it is not clear how important the service is to Tim Cook, whether it will be overshadowed by the iTunes Radio project and the like.
It is clear, however, that convincing the publisher to change its pricing policy will not be an easy task. The current state and prices on the market are already a great success for the negotiators of the streaming companies, and many are surprised that the publishing house allowed services such as Spotify, Rdio or Beats Music to run. On the part of music distributors, there were understandably (and rightly) concerns that listening to music in the style of "all-you-can-eat" at such low prices could significantly limit the sale of CDs and music over the Internet.
Indeed, music sales are declining and profits from streaming services are growing rapidly. However, it is not certain how much Spotify et al are behind the declining sales. and to what extent free services like YouTube, Pandora and others. So now it's better for publishers to give way to Spotify and others and at least make some profit, than to throw away the opportunity and get destroyed by, say, YouTube. After all, streaming services carry with them users who pay for music, even if it is the smallest amount.
Spotify, the largest streaming service on the market, reports over 1 million users. However, a recent survey found that only a quarter of them spend more than $10 per quarter on music. The remaining users then prefer the free version of the service with various restrictions and advertising.
YouTube also pays publishers... Although YT does not pay users for playing, the profit is from advertisements (and publishers are then paid a fee from this money). So I don't completely understand why YouTube or Pandora should be dangerous for the publishers, when they make a profit from both (and none of us can judge how much more or less, born from Spotify, etc., because the amounts are set individually between each service and the publisher separately).
Where did you get that Spotify user data please? According to their website, these are completely different numbers...
Paying subscribers: Over 10 million
Active users: Over 40 million*
https://press.spotify.com/us/information/