Apple has agreed to pay the artists during the 3-month period in which Apple Music is offered for free for users and thus convinced 20.000 independent record companies to accept his terms to join the new audio streaming service.
For each song listened during this period, the Apple company will pay 0.2 cents to the record companies, a small amount at first glance, but which can generate serious income for the songs that prove to be extremely popular in Apple's system.
The price is similar to the one paid by Spotify while listening to songs through the free system offered to users, so we are not talking about any difference in what Apple offers to artists Apple Music and what its competition offers.
Apart from the 0.2 cents paid for the song, the Apple company will pay another 0.047 cents for each listen made for the song, so that in total an artist will receive quite a large sum if his songs gather millions or tens of millions of listens.
For each song that is streamed free, Apple will pay 0.2 cents for the use of recordings, a rate that music executives said was roughly comparable to the free tiers from services like Spotify. This rate does not include a smaller payment for songwriting rights that goes to music publishers; Apple is still negotiating with many publishers over those terms, several publishing companies confirmed on Wednesday.
Basically, Apple takes money out of its own pockets to keep its artists happy and gives up part of the profit that Apple Music will bring, but in the end it still stands to gain because we are talking about a very large number of users interested in Apple Music .
Cu prices of 4.99 euros in Romania or $9.99 in the US and $2 in India, Apple Music could have tens of millions of subscribers worldwide, and from here Apple and its partners could earn serious amounts of money annually.
