Free services must pay higher royalties.
Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
Posted on 12/17/2015 10:49:33 AM PST by Swordmaker
Free services must pay higher royalties.
Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
In news which could well be good for Apple Music, but bad for rival free streaming music services, the federal Copyright Royalty Board has ruled that ad-supported internet radio companies such as Pandora must pay higher royalty rates to artists and record labels.
Starting next year, Pandora, iHeartMedia and others will pay 17 cents for every 100 plays of a song on their free tiers. This fee will increase over the following four years in line with inflation.
Currently, Pandora pays whichever is greater out of 25 percent of revenue or 14 cents per 100 plays on its free tier. Somewhat confusingly, the new report suggests that royalty rates per 100 plays on Pandora’s $5 per month premium service will be set at 22 cents, although this would be down from the 25 cents it claims it currently pays.
Either way, the net result is that things are being made tougher for streaming music services operating on free tiers, which Apple Music notably does not do. This comes after Pandora CEO Brian McAndres dismissed Apple Music back in July as nothing to worry about.
While I can’t imagine that Apple wants to pay more royalties than it has to, it’s also in the great position of not having to rely on its music service to make the majority of its revenue, as is the case for rival music and internet radio services.
Even if Apple Music never became a profitable business for Apple on its own, the fact that it can drive customers to buy iPhones, iPads and other devices — combined with the company’s enormous cash reserves — gives it an obvious edge in the marketplace. According to Apple, its Apple Music service currently has around 6.5 million paying subscribers.
While artists will no doubt complain that the increase in royalties is still not what it should be, yesterday’s announcement is still a positive step toward artists being properly remunerated.
Via: Wall Street Journal
This is why, so many years now, I have been a paying subscriber to Live365. None of these hassles, and all the quality present much earlier than millenial brain wave stuff like “Iheart”.
Convenient how the government decides that FEES should increase based on inflation, but when it comes time to increase Social Security payments, etc, the government can’t find any inflation at all to be worried about!
Pinging dayglored, Shadow Ace, and ThunderSleeps for their attention.
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Yes, they don't consider price increases in food, housing, or energy to be part of inflation. What? Say that again. . . what are they idiots. Yes, they are.
Apple is an awful, predatory corporation solely interested in soaking profits from lemmings on products built by 7 year old kids in slave factories.
No, thanks Apple.
Yes, I know all that downloaded music becomes useless once I stop paying the monthly fee. But how is that any different from the Netflix and HBO model? You stop paying your subscription, you lose access to the content. Makes sense to me.
If I really want to own something, I'll purchase it but I've collected so much music over the years, I'll never have time to listen to it all again. My music tastes has evolved over the years. I'll never again play those Kiss and Black Sabbath records I so ardently collected during the 1970s. Yet I purchased them then and they are useless to me now.
For $9.99 a month, I can delete and replace my music as my tastes continue to change. That's a pretty fair deal.
There are NO underage workers building Apple products. ZERO. Apple audits the supply chain and there are draconian penalties for contractors who break Apple's contracts prohibiting hiring underage workers, starting with requiring the contractor to pay for a full ride college education through age 25 for any underage worker found in their employ, up to losing ALL Apple contracts. Apple has actually pulled multi-Billion dollar contracts from suppliers for violating labor conditions in their contracts.
A audit of ten years of employees among millions of employees in Apple's supply chain found approximately 70 underage workers, most of whom were around sixteen years of age and who had used faked or borrowed identity cards to get hired. All of these were offered the scholarships paid by the contractors who had erroneously failed to vet them correctly and hired them. Surprisingly, about 25% turned down the offer and preferred to go to work elsewhere so they could continue sending their wages to their families.
One company in Indonesia was found to systematically hire underage workers and apple pulled a $2 Billion contract and black-balled them from all future Apple work. The job they were doing went to another company that cost Apple more.
Apple's workers in their supply chain run 18 to 32 years of age with some older, but there are no SEVEN YEAR OLD CHILDREN anywhere. That is a propaganda lie, or one you just made up for your post.
If what you claim were true, the companies that contract for Apple also contract to make consumer electronics for Microsoft, HP, Lenovo, Sony, Samsung, and 500 other companies, so every single one of those companies would be just as guilty as Apple. . . but in fact, Apple is the ONLY one who places its own employees in its supply chain to assure compliance with its. In fact, one other myth needs to be laid to rest: ALL of the suicides that were attributed to Apple assembly line workers in Apple's supply chain were not in Apple's supply chain. The workers who "reportedly" killed themselves because of dire working conditions at FoxConn in 2010 did not kill themselves due to working conditions, nor were there that many in a population of workers of over 800,000. (It was a suicide rate that turned out to be an amazingly low 0.75 per 100,000 workers per year compared to 11 per 100,000 in the USA in the same age cohorts and it was FAR lower than the suicide rate among students in American IVY LEAGUE UNIVERSITIES!) The workers the news media attributed to Apple were actually working at a plant making Microsoft Xboxes, HP Computers, Sony Playstations, and Nokia cellular phones. The plant was 150 miles away from the nearest assembly line for any Apple products.
The infamous threat of a mass suicide where 150-200 employees threatened to jump off of the roof during a labor dispute occurred when the employees were being moved from assembling Microsoft Xboxes where they had unlimited opportunities for overtime to another assembly line manufacturing HP computer cases, with ZERO overtime available because of no demand. They were unhappy about the move. . . and demanded equal overtime availability at the new line.
So much for the Apple Labor Suicide myth.
Apple pays the assembly line workers on its lines three to seven times the minimum factory wage in China. That's some slave labor rates, Iceman, because, the Apple assembly line workers are in the lower end of the bourgeoning Chinese middle class.
Try to learn the some modicum of FACTS before you spout mis-information about slave labor.
1 million plays x .17 cents = $170,000
Example: ABC Radio Network has approximately 4,600 affiliate stations reaching about 109 million listeners.
4 plays a day x .17 cents x 4600 stations x 365 days comes to over $1.1 million a year.
#7 I know all that downloaded music becomes useless once I stop paying the monthly fee.
I am sure there is a program that will either record what you are playing and save it as a regular mp3 or strip out the software that would stop you from keeping the songs.
It is a lot of fuss and bother though and at current pricepoints, it's easier to just download a legal copy for yourself.
I will do this however if the song is unavailable for purchase as an Mp3 (I refuse to ever by another compact disc again) or if I want to record something special, like a radio show or something of that nature.
#8 See links at the site for additional articles.
http://businessethicscases.blogspot.com/2013/04/apple-inc-severe-employee-abuse-2011.html
Compared to other occupations these folks would have to do I would say they are better off temporarily as they could take the experience and move on to other better jobs.
I rather play Don Ho 33rpms on an old Victrola for eternity than to trust Apple on streaming or anything else.
Another death in Apple’s ‘Mordor’ – its Foxconn Chinese assembly plant
iPhone line worker, 28, throws himself from building
7 Aug 2015 at 23:56, Kieren McCarthy
A worker at Apple’s iPhone manufacturing plant in Zhengzhou, visited by CEO Tim Cook just a few months ago, has been found dead, reigniting concerns over how the iGiant’s Chinese outsourcer Foxconn treats its employees.
Foxconn, dubbed Mordor by Apple engineers, said in a statement that it was cooperating with the authorities over the circumstances of the 28-year-old male employee’s death. He was found outside a building on its campus in central China earlier this week.
While Foxconn did not state the cause, New York-based non-profit China Labor Watch has said it was suicide – the worker jumped to his death from a building – reflecting a number of other similar incidents in the past few years.
The factory in question was visited by Apple CEO Tim Cook in October last year where he posed for pictures and praised the “talented people” there who have helped build the latest iPhone model, the iPhone 6.
In 2010, no fewer than six Foxconn employees killed themselves and two others attempted suicide, reportedly over working conditions. One leapt to his death after allegedly being roughed up by Foxconn security in their search for a misplaced Apple iPhone 4G prototype.
In January 2012, a group of workers at a Foxconn factory in Wuhan threatened to jump off the roof of the factory after bosses went back on an offer to provide one month’s wages as severance pay. That factory made parts for Microsoft’s Xbox gaming console.
In December 2013, Apple sent medical experts to a Chinese factory run by another manufacturer – Pegatron, which builds the company’s iPhones – after a teenaged boy died from pneumonia. That death again raised concerns over the sweatshop-style working conditions (Apple’s team concluded the conditions were not to blame).
And in spring 2013, three workers from the same factory as the most recent death committed suicide in just three weeks, according to China Labor Watch. Those deaths were reportedly in response to a new workplace policy of not allowing any talking on the job or risk being faced with immediate dismissal.
Foxconn is one of the world’s largest contract manufacturers and has a workforce of over one million people in China. In response to the deaths and poor conditions, the company raised its wages in 2010, and opened itself up to audits of its conditions in 2012. It also says it has introduced suicide-prevention programs at its factories.
With a workforce that size – the equivalent of a big Western city – suicides are bound to happen, statistically speaking.
But this isn’t a city, it’s a multibillion-dollar company, and employees aren’t statistics. Concerns exist over conditions, including safety, overtime, and a lack of unions to look out for the workers’ best interests. ®
Before a rash of suicides focused attention on Apple’s manufacturing suppliers, few people in America knew or even cared much about its giant contract manufacturer in China, Foxconn.
The Taiwanese supplier came in for even more unflattering attention in a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation of working conditions inside these out-of-sight factories, where hundreds of thousands of anonymous workers assemble the iPhones and iPads that have made Apple the world’s most valuable publicly traded company.
Foxconn is eager to present a different face, and agreed to give Re/code a tour of a sprawling manufacturing facility in Shenzhen in the south China province of Guangdong were it makes iPads and Macs. To be clear, we were not allowed unfettered access. A special assistant to CEO Terry Gou traveled from Shanghai to escort us on a tour that appeared to paint a picture of workers being treated well. We weren’t permitted to observe the factory floor — an unidentified customer wouldn’t allow that.
The undercover story by the Shanghai Evening Post reporter paints a grim picture. About workers’ living quarters, he writes, “The whole dormitory smells like garbage when I walk in.” He adds that when he opened his closet, “lots of cockroaches crawl out from inside and the bed sheets that are being distributed to every new workers are full of dirt and ashes.” His job at the factory: marking four spots on the back plate of an iPhone 5 with an oil-based paint pen. The marks had to be within 5 millimeters of the designated points and he was expected to complete five plates every minute. Supervisors repeatedly reprimanded the journalist for failing to place the marks accurately.
The journalist’s all-night shift lasted 10 hours with only one break for dinner at 11pm. When the shift ended at 6 AM, supervisors exhorted the workers to put in two hours of overtime, for a wage of just $4. The journalist describes a worker who couldn’t take the pressure: “A new worker who sat opposite me became exhausted and laid down for a short while,” he writes. “The supervisor has noticed him and punished him by asking him to stand at one corner for 10 minutes like the old school days.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2012/09/12/apples-new-foxconn-embarrassment/
Apple is such a hugely popular company and the buzz around the new iPhone is so great, reports of continued worker abuse will not dampen the public’s enthusiasm for Apple products or affect the company stock price. But the media and labor advocacy groups will continue to scrutinize Foxconn’s labor practices. Customers do not like the idea that their products are being produced in abusive sweat shops. Sumofus.org, a group formed this year that has been protesting labor abuses at Apple, issued a press release yesterday. “Back-to-back independent reports confirm that Apple and its suppliers are still treating workers poorly, and in some cases even worse than before,†it said. “As the richest company in the world, with a record-breaking profit margin for the last quarter of 44.1%, they have the power to pressure Foxconn and force change. Put simply, if Apple demands it, it’ll happen, and this is what their customers want.â€
The undercover story by the Shanghai Evening Post reporter paints a grim picture. About workers’ living quarters, he writes, “The whole dormitory smells like garbage when I walk in.†He adds that when he opened his closet, “lots of cockroaches crawl out from inside and the bed sheets that are being distributed to every new workers are full of dirt and ashes.†His job at the factory: marking four spots on the back plate of an iPhone 5 with an oil-based paint pen. The marks had to be within 5 millimeters of the designated points and he was expected to complete five plates every minute. Supervisors repeatedly reprimanded the journalist for failing to place the marks accurately.
The journalist’s all-night shift lasted 10 hours with only one break for dinner at 11pm. When the shift ended at 6 AM, supervisors exhorted the workers to put in two hours of overtime, for a wage of just $4. The journalist describes a worker who couldn’t take the pressure: “A new worker who sat opposite me became exhausted and laid down for a short while,†he writes. “The supervisor has noticed him and punished him by asking him to stand at one corner for 10 minutes like the old school days.â€
http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2012/09/12/apples-new-foxconn-embarrassment/
Thanks the programs they have are easy to use.
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