9to5Mac: “Apple Music’s Spatial Audio royalties mean a pay cut for Indies, say labels”

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.

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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.

Ben Lovejoy

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.

The Atlantic: “Is Old Music Killing New Music?”

Old songs now represent 70 percent of the U.S. music market, according to the latest numbers from MRC Data, a music-analytics firm. Those who make a living from new music—especially that endangered species known as the working musician—should look at these figures with fear and trembling. But the news gets worse: The new-music market is actually shrinking. All the growth in the market is coming from old songs.

The 200 most popular new tracks now regularly account for less than 5 percent of total streams. That rate was twice as high just three years ago. The mix of songs actually purchased by consumers is even more tilted toward older music. The current list of most-downloaded tracks on iTunes is filled with the names of bands from the previous century, such as Creedence Clearwater Revival and The Police.

Ted Gioia

Interesting observation, but I fear the author is drawing exaggerated conclusions in support of his own preconceived ideas, as he later launches into a tireless rant against the music industry. First of all, the definition of this supposedly ‘old’ music is tracks released more than 18 months ago – the standard delineation in the music business in fact. That can hardly be considered ancient music snuffing out rising talent. The original report also makes clear that this decline happened for the first time since MRC Data began tracking streaming music in 2008 – not exactly a long-standing trend that should be looked upon with fear and trembling.

Popular Science: “Why Spotify’s music recommendations always seem so spot on”

Spotify has even been testing a neural network called CoSeRNN that weighs certain features such as past listening history and current context to suggest song recommendations that suit the moment.

As for testing whether music mirrors certain human characteristics, they published results from a small survey-based study last December to see how music preference matched up to certain personality traits. In a blog post, the researchers noted that there appeared to be some correlations between personality and music genre preference. Unsurprisingly, people who identified as “open to new experiences” checked out Discover Weekly more; those who identified them as extroverts listened more to playlists that other people had created, while those who identified as introverts preferred to delve into a newly discovered artist’s discography.

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To stay ahead of our changing preferences, and keep their recommendations fresh, Spotify also needs to be able to understand how what we like can evolve over time. Earlier this year, researchers there built a model based on a dataset of 100,000 Spotify users who were continuously active from 2016 to 2020. They looked at the entire streaming history of every user, grouped their music into “micro-genres”, and mapped them across time. What they came up with was a connected graph that illustrated the transitions between different genres of music. As an example, their model suggested that to go from liking “EDM” to “nu jazz” or “gospel”, users were likely to pass through a phase of liking “tropical house”, which is chill but upbeat electronic music.

Charlotte Hu

Interesting overview of the various research and data crunching powering Spotify’s recommendations algorithm. I can’t say that I noticed some super-relevant suggestions from the app, but I admit that its autogenerated playlists (artist radio’s and genre mixes) are generally well tuned and enjoyable. The insights into microgenres have been put to good use in the Spotify Wrapped yearly recaps as well. I find these fascinating, and apparently so do a lot of other people (who wouldn’t want to feel unique and special?), as in 2021 we got a second similar event in June, Only You. Before then, I never heard of the music genre ‘Morna’, but apparently I am a regular listener.

The Conversation: “How a team of musicologists and computer scientists completed Beethoven’s unfinished 10th Symphony”

As the project progressed, the human side and the machine side of the collaboration evolved. Werzowa, Gotham, Levin, and Röder deciphered and transcribed the sketches from the 10th Symphony, trying to understand Beethoven’s intentions. Using his completed symphonies as a template, they attempted to piece together the puzzle of where the fragments of sketches should go – which movement, which part of the movement.

They had to make decisions, like determining whether a sketch indicated the starting point of a scherzo, which is a very lively part of the symphony, typically in the third movement. Or they might determine that a line of music was likely the basis of a fugue, which is a melody created by interweaving parts that all echo a central theme.

The AI side of the project – my side – found itself grappling with a range of challenging tasks.

Ahmed Elgammal

Fascinating accomplishment, one that simultaneously highlights the current limitations of AI (the Scientific American podcast episode where I heard about this makes it a lot clearer how much human input was required at each step, with composer Walter Werzowa listening to hundreds of software-generated variations daily and selecting the closest to Beethoven’s work) and its dangers. Specifically, that people would use similar tools to revive famous past musicians, flooding the market with familiar sounds and thus reducing public demand for young musicians and fresh creative work. Current stars may also use the same tools to ‘compose’ music and release hits at a faster pace, keeping them in the public’s attention – and, again, marginalizing young talent with fewer resources. Either way, the end result would be a less diverse music selection and a growing concentration of income in the hands of those who can afford to make use of these complex algorithms.

T3: “AirPods Max and AirPods Pro don’t support Apple Music Lossless, Apple confirms”

Apple has announced that it’s adding ‘Lossless’ and ‘Hi-Resolution Lossless’ streaming options to Apple Music in June 2021 for no extra charge, as well as offering Dolby Atmos ‘Spatial Audio’ 3D music, too.

In Apple’s new terminology, ‘Lossless’ is CD quality, from 16-bit 44.1kHz playback up to 24-bit 48kHz, while ‘Hi-Res Lossless’ delivers up to 24-bit 192kHz. Don’t worry if you don’t know what that means – it means music comes in larger files with much less compression, meaning more realistic results, provided you’ve got good enough equipment to actually hear the difference.

Apple has confirmed to T3 that this equipment, sadly, does not include AirPods Pro or AirPods Max. Both of Apple’s elite headphone models only use the Bluetooth AAC codec when connected to an iPhone, which means they can’t receive the full quality of the Apple Music ‘Lossless’ files, which will be encoded as ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) files.

Matthew Bolton

Apple’s current speakers do not support this recently announced lossless playback either – but the company is at least planning to add support via an upcoming software update. As for the headphones, playback quality looks limited even while wired (apparently requiring a Lightning to 3.5 mm audio cable), because of the analog to digital conversion in the cable.

Protocol: “Jack Dorsey is so money: What Tidal and banking do for Square”

Square could build out credit or other products or tools for artists. Even though Tidal has been declining as a streaming service, they have a strong brand and access to artists, said Laura Chau, partner at Canaan. With Square buying Tidal, they essentially are buying access to those artists and circumventing the creator acquisition challenge that many emerging companies will have.

The flip side is that there are already a plethora of creator services companies out there, helping bands with everything from playlist sharing to merchandise sales. Those companies include Spotify, which has been looking to offer musicians more tools after acquiring artistry services startups SoundBetter and Soundtrap. It’s super crowded right now, Hu said.

The one major differentiator for Square could be its financial services business, freshly strengthened with its own chartered bank. That is one of the growth areas, Mulligan said. The company could offer artists advances, royalty processing and more, effectively taking over some of the roles traditionally held by record labels.

Benjamin Pimentel, Tomio Geron & Janko Roettgers

This is one scenario in which the unlikely business association between Square and Tidal may prove beneficial to both parties: Square’s recently approved banking subsidiary providing funds for emerging artists, similarly to artists advances from music labels. From this perspective, this collaboration makes more sense than Twitter’s Super Follows, because it at least starts with a product people are clearly willing to pay for (music) – although nothing is preventing Jack Dorsey from involving his payments company Square into Twitter’s subscriptions initiatives.

The New York Times: “The Day the Music Burned”

The scope of this calamity is laid out in litigation and company documents, thousands of pages of depositions and internal UMG files that I obtained while researching this article. UMG’s accounting of its losses, detailed in a March 2009 document marked “CONFIDENTIAL”, put the number of “assets destroyed” at 118,230. Randy Aronson considers that estimate low: The real number, he surmises, was “in the 175,000 range”. If you extrapolate from either figure, tallying songs on album and singles masters, the number of destroyed recordings stretches into the hundreds of thousands. In another confidential report, issued later in 2009, UMG asserted that “an estimated 500K song titles” were lost.

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Among the incinerated Decca masters were recordings by titanic figures in American music: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Al Jolson, Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland. The tape masters for Billie Holiday’s Decca catalog were most likely lost in total. The Decca masters also included recordings by such greats as Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five and Patsy Cline.

Jody Rosen

Fascinating story, both for the insights into the inner workings of the music industry, and for the sense of immeasurable cultural loss caused by a random fire – and the negligence of the former management at UMG. This reporting prompted a lawsuit by a group of artists seeking damages for the destructions of the masters, but that lawsuit was dismissed earlier this year on the grounds that the label owned the rights to artists’ original recordings, so their heirs are not entitled to damages – goes to show how little leverage artists have in their dealings with music labels.