When Apple Music said it was paying 10% more in Spatial Audio royalties, there were those among us who cynically wondered whether this meant everyone else would be paid less.
But a Financial Times report says that the total royalty payout is remaining unchanged, so the 10% extra for Spatial Audio tracks comes at the expense of other musicians.
The tech group is not paying more money in total: rather, that extra 10 per cent will come out of a fixed pot of money. As a result, songs that are not “spatial” will receive less money.
Indie labels say this means it benefits the big labels – who can afford the added production expenses – at the expense of independent ones, who can’t.
Shoutout to Apple die-hards who keep claiming that the company pays more royalties than the competition, while understanding next to nothing about the music business, and thus is allegedly ‘more supporting of artists’. Here is a clearcut example of Apple leveraging its position as a streaming provider to prop up its own proprietary music format – and taking money from artists in the process, as if it were a struggling startup, not the company with the highest valuation on the stock market. A move that manages to be at the same time blatantly greedy, anticompetitive, and hostile to musicians.
London-based Beggars Group says that the costs of converting existing songs to Spatial Audio costs around $20,000 per album, and multiplying that by its 3,000-album back catalog would cost more than $30M.
I strongly doubt that the extra 10% for Spatial Audio (and only from Apple Music streams, which I’m pretty sure is not leading in overall streaming volume) would make up for these high fixed costs of remastering songs for Spatial Audio, except for maybe the top 1–5% of artists…
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