Apple Tells Labels, Unilaterally, That It's Increasing Song Previews To 90 Seconds

from the who's-going-to-sue-first? dept

Thu, Nov 4th 2010 9:57am — Mike Masnick

A couple months ago, rumors made the rounds that Apple was going to double the length of song previews in iTunes from 30 to 60 seconds. An expected announcement did not appear, however, apparently because the music publishers (who in the past have already claimed -- without success -- that Apple should pay performance fees on those 30 second previews) felt Apple first needed to get permission from them, as well as the labels. So it's interesting to see that, at least with the record labels, Apple appears to be taking an aggressive approach, sending out letters simply telling labels that their deals have changed and song previews will now be 90 seconds:

It'll be interesting to see if Apple did the same thing with publishers... because you'd have to imagine that the publishers would quickly file a lawsuit if that's the case. According to Greg Sandoval, over at News.com, Apple is still negotiating with the publishers. That article includes a typically ridiculous quote from Rick Carnes of the Songwriter's Guild:

"It's like giving away ice cream samples--someone has to pay the cost," said Rick Carnes, president of the Songwriters Guild of America. "I think it would be a good thing for consumers to go to 90 seconds. But they're tripling the amount of time, and they want it for free. I think there ought to be compensation. I believe anytime you use music, you ought to reward the people making the music."

Does Rick really believe that? If so, the Songwriters should fire him as their leader. What he should be looking for is what will maximize the revenue overall, not what will maximize the revenue per use. If you get paid per use, and it means shorter previews -- but that means many fewer sales and less overall money for the artists, then Carnes with his "anytime you use, you pay" philosophy is doing serious harm to the songwriters. And, of course, the actual evidence goes against Carnes. Studies have shown that such longer previews increases purchasing, but the publishing folks and the songwriters like Carnes are more interested in licensing than in direct sales anyway (even if that's really short-sighted). It's too bad that the Songwriters Guild would be represented by someone without their best interests in mind.

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Filed Under: music, previews, publishers, rick carnes, songwriters
Companies: apple

42 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 4 Nov 2010 @ 10:06am

Pft, how stupid...

I preview all my music on YouTube anyway, so I can actually hear the full song. There have been far too many times that a 10 second string of bad lyrics, or random insert sounds has absolutely ruined a song for me, and I don't buy music that I won't enjoy listening to several times.

Of course, limiting preview times fits in rather well with radio-played music. Most pop music is ridiculously repetitive, with lyrics that are terrible when you actually pay attention to them.
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- Chosen Reject, 4 Nov 2010 @ 10:29am
  
  Re:
  It's too late for this. The last time I bought a song on iTunes (years ago) I already knew exactly which song I wanted. Or so I thought. Apparently there were different versions of the same song that were not clearly labeled. The 30 second preview wasn't enough pick the one I wanted and I ended up buying the wrong one. It was still a good song, but not the version I wanted. I've never been back, and I doubt I ever will.
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Jason, 4 Nov 2010 @ 10:08am

Who's paying for the sample?
"It's like giving away ice cream samples--someone has to pay the cost,"

Really? The real question here is bandwith and storage and who pays for that. If it's Apple, then what this is really like is having your distributor give you free ingredients, equipment, and labor to make extra ice cream to give away free samples to sell more of your ice cream.

And this is bad for who?
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- Jason, 4 Nov 2010 @ 10:08am
  
  Re: Who's paying for the sample?
  ...fat people?
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Anonymous Coward, 4 Nov 2010 @ 10:09am

The only reason this would make sense would be if people were using previews as a way to just listen to music. Does anyone do this? I certainly have used Youtube to listen to music, but I use the previews to make sure it's the song that I actually want.
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- Anonymous Coward, 4 Nov 2010 @ 12:59pm
  
  Re:
  And even those are only temporary. You can't stuff a youtube video into your ipod and listen to it whenever you want. Same with the iTunes previews. I'm not going to sit there and press play on each and every preview, because I don't have time to deal with that much tediousness. I'm going to just grab the mp3, through whatever channels I need to, slap it into my player of choice, and have it do all that for me.
  
  I think the companies are just being dumb for the sake of being dumb at this point.
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Vic, 4 Nov 2010 @ 10:11am

It's funny how the songs are again compared to material goods (ice cream) at one point. And then later in the same quote He admits that it is not really like anything material ("anytime you use music, you ought to reward the people making the music").

I would like to ask him right away - do you pay the maker of your car EVERY time you drive it? Do you really pay to architects and builders of your home EVERY time you come home? How about paying to clothes designers and taylors every time you get dressed?
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Hephaestus (profile), 4 Nov 2010 @ 10:11am

I had this flash back just now.
I can name that song in 3 notes ....

Which is probably what Rick Carnes of the Songwriter's Guild would actually want since the previews are not getting paid for.

Or would that lead to a per note fee request?
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- :Lobo Santo (profile), 4 Nov 2010 @ 10:16am
  
  Re: I had this flash back just now.
  Well, you just take the total requested fee and divide it by the number of notes in the song. Tada, per-note fee amount.
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  - Hephaestus (profile), 4 Nov 2010 @ 10:27am
    
    Re: Re: I had this flash back just now.
    What if it has sampling? how do you handle that?
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    - :Lobo Santo (profile), 4 Nov 2010 @ 10:52am
      
      Re: Re: Re: I had this flash back just now.
      Same rate applies. Can also be re-calculated to per-second fee or per millisecond fee given the fee and song length are known.
      
      So, 1/3 second samplings can now be accurately billed for!
      
      ; P
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      - Brendan (profile), 25 Nov 2010 @ 10:54pm
        
        Re: Re: Re: Re: I had this flash back just now.
        But do we apply the same sampling rate standards to account for aliasing within the range of human hearing?
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  - PRMan, 4 Nov 2010 @ 10:43am
    
    Re: Re: I had this flash back just now.
    "Well, you just take the total requested fee and divide it by the number of notes in the song. Tada, per-note fee amount."
    
    But then rap would be free! I kid, I kid.
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Mike42 (profile), 4 Nov 2010 @ 10:15am

What about bad music?
So if I hear music, I should have to reward the writer and the performer, no matter how bad it is? I personally feel that Dexies Midnight Runners and Mayday Parade owe me money for the mental anguish of being unintentionally subjected to the awful off-key wailing that they consider music. Pony up, boys!
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John Doe, 4 Nov 2010 @ 10:21am

What they are really afraid of...
They are really afraid that in 90 seconds you will be able to figure out the song is crap and not buy it.

One flaw with his logic is giving out ice cream samples is giving out a finite resource so of course it gets paid for. Giving out a sample of 1's and 0's is an infinite resource, so why pay for it? Samples don't cost anybody anything except maybe iTunes who hopes to produce sales.
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- Danny, 4 Nov 2010 @ 11:20am
  
  Re: What they are really afraid of...
  Agreed. They want you to almost blindly buy music because it saves the trouble of actually coming up with good quality music.
  
  And as for that ice cream analogy. A sample clip of a song can be heard by people for all of eternity and the only cost would be server maintenance. On the other hand Cold Stone can only give away so many sample spoons of ice cream before the bucket goes empty. So unless this guy is really trying to say that the maintenance on server that can hold sample clip for all eternity (or at least several years) is on par with a bucket of ice cream that only lasts a few hours he doesn't know his analgies.
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- Anonymous Coward, 5 Nov 2010 @ 1:35am
  
  Re: What they are really afraid of...
  Digital content is of course infinite, but you hit the nail on the head with your original point.
  
  Given out free samples of crap tasting ice cream won't get you any more "sucker" sales. People will try the free sample, spit it out and go to your competitor to get some real ice cream.
  
  He's thinking the exact same thing will happen with 90 second previews and to make up for the loss in revenue from lost "sucker" sales, he wants some compensation.
  
  Makes sense really.
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Michael, 4 Nov 2010 @ 10:21am

Links please.
Not that I disagree, but anytime I see the phrase "studies have shown", I cringe a little, but only when there are no links to these studies. It may be that you've linked to these studies time and again, but I'm sure there are some new people that read techdirt everyday that see this phrase and wonder where exactly these studies may be. Even just a link to a generic page with many more links to the studies in question would be better than nothing.
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Anonymous Coward, 4 Nov 2010 @ 10:24am

"I have altered our deal..."
"I have altered our deal. Pray that I do not alter it any further."
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- Anonymous Coward, 4 Nov 2010 @ 10:37am
  
  Re: "I have altered our deal..."
  http://video.adultswim.com/robot-chicken/this-deals-getting-worse-all-the-time.html
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  - marak (profile), 4 Nov 2010 @ 2:06pm
    
    Re: Re: "I have altered our deal..."
    Bloody hell only US can view that link o.0 (apparently can search their ''uk'' version of the site but bugger that)
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David Sanger (profile), 4 Nov 2010 @ 10:39am

My guess is that if they did an online survey they'd find this will increase track sales. I, for one, will be more likely to buy a song if I hear most of it and like it.

And of course the ONLY reason for Apple to do this is to increase sales.
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Pierre Wolff (profile), 4 Nov 2010 @ 10:50am

Love/Hate relationship w/Apple
For as many things as can piss me off with Apple, there's plenty to like about them too. First they fought the good fight in getting $.99 tracks into iTunes (nevermind that iTunes is a closed system), and now they're pushing for 90 second tracks, also great for consumers. Love'em or hate'em, Apple has been an important partner in moving the ball forward on getting content distributed online against some very large and powerful industries and their lobbyists. Hope they can pull this latest initiative off as well.
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- PaulT (profile), 4 Nov 2010 @ 11:04am
  
  Re: Love/Hate relationship w/Apple
  Plus, it shows how stupid the whole argument against this is. Apple have been making those arguments primarily for profit - a fixed price made it as easy as possible for people to shop for music, and reduced the temptation to shop around elsewhere, for example. They put on a face of consumer friendliness, but they position themselves for maximum profit in the long term.
  
  No matter how consumer friendly, Apple are hardly likely to fight for something that *reduces* their iTunes revenue unless it somehow increased their hardware sales. That's unlikely with increasing preview length, so they literally have no reason to fight for it unless they expect download sales to increase!
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PaulT (profile), 4 Nov 2010 @ 10:51am

"It's like giving away ice cream samples--someone has to pay the cost,"

Erm, yeah... the people supplying the raw materials and shipping costs used. In this case - Apple, who are supplying the server space, bandwidth and administration. It costs the labels absolutely nothing, and costs the songwriters less - what extra costs are incurred by song-writers apart from the mythical "more people might have paid"? Even if you accept the stupid apples-to-oranges comparison of physical goods, it still makes no sense as an argument.

"I believe anytime you use music, you ought to reward the people making the music"

Again, for the utter morons who seem to be in charge of this industry: the use they are putting it is FREE ADVERTISING FOR YOUR PRODUCT. The only reason why people would listen to the free sample instead of buying the product would be if 90 seconds is more than enough - in which case you have a shoddy product. If your song-writing produces less than 90 seconds of a song that's worth listening to, that's not Apple's problem.

For others, it's a better way to sample the music on offer, especially for those outside of the mainstream pop arena where 30 seconds is woefully inadequate to make sure you have the right song (dance fans often can't tell if they have the right remix in 30 seconds, for example, as the 6 - 9 minute tracks often have long intros (1-2 minutes) before the main beat/melody kicks in).
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Anonymous Coward, 4 Nov 2010 @ 11:06am

Would ya look at this friggin' guy....Rick Carnes...wow, what a quote. I love reading stuff like this because it allows me to sit back and think..."I'm more intelligent than the president of the songwriters guild of america"...but I guess thats not really saying much.
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Anonymous Coward, 4 Nov 2010 @ 11:10am

Mmmm... ice cream...
"It's like giving away ice cream samples--someone has to pay the cost," said Rick Carnes, president of the Songwriters Guild of America.

This is funny because giving away ice cream samples is actually great for business--I know that when I go to an ice cream place that lets you have small free samples of a bunch of flavors before you decide, I almost always end up buying a 3-4 scoop large, whereas when the store doesn't let you try samples, I usually end up with a 1-2 scoop small/medium of just a flavor or two that I'm sure I'll like.

Of course, here, unlike with ice cream where the samples actually cost something, the samples cost basically nothing to provide.
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Free Capitalist (profile), 4 Nov 2010 @ 11:29am

Apple is guessing wrong...
Ice cream samples work because what people get to sample for free has value not to mention flavor.

90 second previews will have no impact on sales as long as publishers keep churning out the same homogenized crap.
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Mojo, 4 Nov 2010 @ 11:34am

Wait, so from now on we're only allowed to have 90 seconds of ice cream?
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jdub (profile), 4 Nov 2010 @ 11:45am

Apple is simply trying to play catch up at this point. A lot of the electronic download sites (Juno, MixedUpMusic, etc) you can already listen to the full track let alone 90 second previews. They do this by either overlaying an audio vocal over the song at specific intervals, or only stream 30-60 sec of the song at a time, and if you want to here more of it, or specific section, you have to click on the slider.
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Anonymous Coward, 4 Nov 2010 @ 11:46am

Rick Carnes is right on the money with this one. Apple is increasing the amount of bandwidth they use on previews by 3, and they are eating the whole cost. Somebody should help Apple out here, and since Rick was the one to identify this injustice, I think he should pay, out of pocket, for all the benefit that this will bring the the songwriters he represents. Anything less would be proof positive that he is a selfish liar.
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Anonymous Coward, 4 Nov 2010 @ 12:10pm

I wonder who does this "apple" thing.
Man, that's great. I wonder who runs this company... Because whoever it is seems like a a great CEO. Given the opportunity, the guy who runs this "apple company" is probably a much better CEO than blowhards at competititors.

In a way, it's like comparing Mike Ho to Mike Masnick. Simply no comparison.
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pringerX (profile), 4 Nov 2010 @ 12:17pm

Same old story
The boneheadedness of the recording industry is pretty spectacular. I think another reason they refuse to acknowledge CwF/RtB is that they're too damn lazy- it's not that they're averse to a more effective business model, it's just easier to leech off of the existing system (and run it into the ground).
The main 'disadvantage' I see to CwF/RtB is that it requires a major, continued investment of energy; you have to stay connected and keep giving fans reasons to buy. Which is not a problem for those at the ground level (i.e. musicians) because that's what their passion is, but when you're a fat cat exec, then it's way too much effort.
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Jason, 4 Nov 2010 @ 12:27pm

oohh
They just got EULA'd!
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Anonymous Coward, 4 Nov 2010 @ 12:57pm

Why would he be fired? Stupidity is rewarded in such organizations.
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Anonymous Coward, 4 Nov 2010 @ 1:34pm

I've always been on the PC side of the PC/Mac war, but I've got to give Apple props for such a ballsy move.

Also, Mike, each of the words "Studies have shown" should've linked to one of those studies, for maximum disprovage.
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Anonymous Coward, 4 Nov 2010 @ 2:00pm

I've always thought it was wrong that radio stations have to pay to play a song. The Radio Station pays a record company for the rights to play a recording of a song over the air, which gets the song adored by millions who then purchase the song ( probably one good song on a suck album) which makes the record company filthy rich.

Then the station turns around and charges someone who is not a record producer to put their recording on the same radio station(the recording may even have a song in it) and we call this "Advertising".

Seems to me Apple should be charging the record companies for 90 seconds worth of advertising.
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- Karl (profile), 4 Nov 2010 @ 5:48pm
  
  Re:
  The Radio Station pays a record company
  
  Actually, they don't. Radio stations (of the non-internet kind) do not pay royalties to record companies, they only pay songwriters and publishers.
  
  I'm betting that's why publishers believe they deserve a piece of this pie. The "advertising" justification doesn't work for radio, so (they believe) it shouldn't work for any form of promotion.
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mike allen (profile), 4 Nov 2010 @ 2:42pm

why only part of a song
Here in the UK Spotify stream the whole song dso why cant i tunes?
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Eric C (profile), 4 Nov 2010 @ 3:02pm

Woo-hoo! Now I can hear every Bad Brains song in its entirety without paying!
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David Sanger (profile), 4 Nov 2010 @ 3:13pm

Apple says that "giving potential customers more time to listen to your music will lead to more purchases."

You can be sure that if iTunes track sales suddenly tank because everyone wants to listen to streaming snippets, then they will revert to shorter samples.

On the other hand I expect sales will certainly increase.
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Anonymous Coward, 5 Nov 2010 @ 12:25pm

This is nothing like giving out samples of ice cream. The music is one digital copy of the performance, if these artists had to actually perform the 90 second clip of the music, you could indeed liken it to giving out samples of ice cream. The only company that has to pay for any of this increase in sample size is Apple and by way of increased data usage on their servers. This tool acts like he's making the 'ice cream' by hand.
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