People have been queuing up to take a bite out of Apple... But why? David Crookes looks at the core issues
In 1981, the British synthpop group, The Human League, released a song called Don’t You Want Me. It was a bitter conflicting duet that has been described as a “devastating chronicle of a frayed romance”. Today, though, the tune could so easily be the backdrop to Apple’s rollercoaster relationship with music.
For the line, “I shook you up and turned you around, turned you into someone new,” could be an acid-tongued reminder that music has played a fundamental part in Apple’s prominent rise. This has been the case since 2001, when iTunes was released on the Mac, followed by the iPod some nine months later. Since then, as sales of physical music have fallen and downloads have become standard, Apple has had the world at its feet. “Success has been so easy for you” indeed.
Yet just as music has helped Apple rise like a crescendo, it has also caused it to hit some bum notes. Legions of iTunes users hate the software, and it has led to many an article listing the ‘top 10 reasons iTunes sucks’. Likewise, last year, the world had a less than beautiful day when 500 million iTunes accounts suddenly saw a new entry: U2’s album Songs of Innocence. It may have been a free gift, but it was also Apple’s most expensive gaffe: a $100 million disaster which set punters on edge.
It’s worth noting that music has been both a petal and a thorn for Apple for as long as we can remember. In the late 1970s, it became embroiled in a long-running legal dispute with Apple Corps, the company owned by The Beatles, over competing trademark rights. Then last December it was revealed that Apple had, many years before, deleted songs off customer iPods that had not been purchased from iTunes. This, as you would expect, caused something of a furore.
Each time something like this flares, the message from music fans seems to be clear: “Don’t forget it’s me who put you where you are now and I can put you back there too.” That seemed, once more, to be the general consensus when singer Taylor Swift recently rebuked the company over the way it’s seeking to run its new streaming service, Apple Music, unveiled at the beginning of June.
Back then, the company spending 30 minutes showing off its features while also allowing Apple VP Eddy Cue to indulge in an uncomfortable dance. The company was elated that it had secured the signatures of some very important record label execs and it celebrated by inviting rapper Drake on to the stage to blast out a choon. Pundits praised the venture, saying it would provide strong, healthy competition for Spotify. But musicians, including Swift, decided they didn’t want to throw their entire hand into the venture.
Swift announced that she was holding back her album, 1989, from the streaming service, venting her frustration that Apple Music was offering a three-month trial to anyone who signs up. The 25-year-old explained that “Apple Music will not be paying writers, producers, or artists for those three months.” She added: “I find it to be shocking, disappointing, and completely unlike this historically progressive and generous company.”
The letter was carefully worded – most probably by the singer’s ‘people’ – so as not to unduly upset Apple (perhaps an indication that, for all of the issues music may have with the company, the industry would suffer a gaping financial hole without its support). Nevertheless, it hit the right notes. Swift claimed to be speaking out on behalf of new artists who will not be paid for those initial months.
“This is not about me,” she wrote. “Thankfully I am on my fifth album and can support myself, my band, crew, and entire management team by playing live shows. This is about the new artist or band that has just released their first single and will not be paid for its success”. She also added for good measure: “These are not the complaints of a spoiled, petulant child.”
The singer, whose back catalogue was always going to be made available on Apple Music (this spat only related to 1989), played a blinder. A few days before she released her open letter to Apple on Tumblr, indie labels had been pondering whether or not to license their music to the new Apple service, again because of the free trial period. Swift had effectively become the figurehead of growing disgruntlement among indie musicians and the cause attracted lots of attention among the media.
To be fair to Apple, it is not unusual for streaming services to refrain from making payouts for songs heard by an individual during a free trial period. Spotify does the same. The problem was primarily the length of time of the trial. According to industry analysts a three-month trial period – which is designed to hook people into the service – could be valued at as much as a stonking $4.4 billion.
Among those objecting was the British company Beggars Group. It said the trial meant record labels would be bearing an aspect of Apple’s customer acquisition costs and it made its feeling known in a press release. “We are naturally very concerned, especially for artists releasing new albums in the next three months, that all streaming on the new service will be unremunerated until the end of September,” it said.
That did not generate anywhere near the publicity that Swift did, though. Even the threat of withdrawing labels including 4AD, Rough Trade, XL Recordings, Young Turks and Matador (labels that count artists such as Radiohead and Vampire Weekend among their rosters) did not wake the giant sufficiently. So the disagreement rumbled on until (to paraphrase The Human League once more) Swift shook Apple up and turned it around, and turned it into someone new.
It was very a fitting move for the Shake It Off singer especially since Eddy Cue quickly tweeted: “We hear you @taylorswift13 and indie artists. Love, Apple.” The backlash paid off and Apple announced it would be paying artists for free streams after all. “#AppleMusic will pay artist for streaming, even during customer’s free trial period,” he added.
Cue explained more in a phone conversation to Peter Kafka, a writer on <re/code> (tinyurl.com/qg3ates). He said Apple would pay rights holders for the three months, although not at the same rate Apple would pay outside of the trial period. It would be on a per-stream basis rather than a percentage of revenue, he continued. And that, it transpired, was enough to get people back onside. As Kirk McElheran explained in a fantastic post on his Kirkville blog (tinyurl.com/nzzjy2d) Apple is paying between 1.5% to 3% more in overall royalties than other streaming services but, at the same time, it could have done without the negative publicity in the days leading up to the June 30 launch of Apple Music.
Watch Out
Apple must be getting accustomed to backlashes, though. The most recent physical product to amaze its way out of the doors of the Apple Campus at 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino, California, has been the Apple Watch and, like Music, it provoked vitriol even before it was available for sale. Forbes contributor Ewan Spencer wrote a piece headlined ‘Why I hope the Apple Watch fails’, and it was facing a backlash over its battery life and a mandatory companion app.
An 18-hour battery life seemed decent enough when it was announced (just plug it in at night and let it power up while you sleep), but it came with a caveat of sorts: “dependent on usage”. This pointed to the juice disappearing at a much faster rate: three hours if you’re gassing on your watch like Michael Knight becoming over familiar with KITT. There were also many complaints that the iOS 8.2 update added a nonremovable Apple Watch app. For a month, this acted merely as an advert and cluttered up the home screens.
Yet the biggest backlash came over the delivery times being quoted by people preordering the Watch online on the day it became available. The 42mm Space Grey model had an extraordinarily long lead time even though, realistically, Apple should really have noticed that it would be the most popular. Customers snapping up an Apple Watch within minutes of it becoming available were informed of shipping estimates four to six weeks away. Twitter was awash with anger and it was a major failure on Apple’s part.
Even those buying a higherend, more expensive Watch were affected. The MD of a publishing company cancelled his order saying he hated waiting, did not feel valued as a customer and had suffered a lack of communication. His £8,500, he surmised, could be better spent. Others with less expensive orders even regretted their purchase when it arrived. “Ditching the Apple Watch for my G-Shock. Feels good to have a decent timepiece on my wrist again,” said one. “Everyone I know with an Apple Watch is either selling or returning it,” said another. Has #AppleHateGate begun polled The Mirror newspaper? A total of 68% said ‘yes’.
No News...
But, read all about it. The problems have continued to mount. Between June 8th and 12th in San Francisco, Apple held its annual Worldwide Developers Conference and it took the opportunity to unveil iOS 9. One of the changes concerned Newsstand, the app which allows people to buy magazines and newspapers to read on their iPhone and iPad. It’s a sort of virtual WHSmiths but it hasn’t been entirely successful (even though it has cut the number of magazines some households collect in the course of a month, and so lessened a fair few rows).
Newsstand is being replaced by an app called News. It will aggregate stories from the most popular websites and newspapers and, like existing apps such as Flipboard, present them in a magazine-like format. Content will be pulled from the likes of The New York Times as well as publishers such as Hearst and Time Inc. Publishers are also being encouraged to sign up but herein has lurked a little problem.
Apple sent an unsolicited mass email to publishers with a nice invite. It detailed the terms and conditions of the News app and service. On the face of it, it was nothing to worry about. It could have been seen as spam but all it needed was a tap of the delete button and the issue was nothing but a fleeting few seconds of time. Except anyone merely junking that email was making a mistake. Apple was presuming acceptance of the terms unless a publisher actively opted out.
Simply ignoring the email therefore meant that publishers were granting Apple permission to use their RSS content. That led to worry and concern that publishers were being bound to the agreement even if they had not seen it or had simply deleted it without paying much attention. And what made the matter even worse than that was the wording of the terms and conditions. It said: “If we receive a legal claim about your RSS content, we will tell you so that you can resolve the issue, including indemnifying Apple if Apple is included in the claim.”
The idea that the publishers were being asked to stump up any potential legal fees that Apple may incur frightened a great many of them, especially given that a good number are small companies or individuals. But some also felt Apple was being very cheek, and more than a little presumptuous.
“Let me get this straight, Apple: you send me an e-mail outlining the terms under which you will redistribute my content, and you will just assume that I agree to your terms unless I opt out?” programmer Mike Ash wrote on his personal blog. There was also a backlash against Apple asking that publishers agree to place advertising next to or near their content without paying the contentprovider any slice of the resulting revenues.
Apple is not the only company to suffer a backlash from those who deal with the written word. Amazon has also come under fire for its decision to pay independent authors based on the number of pages read, rather than the number of times their book has been borrowed. It related to authors who have enrolled on the Kindle Direct Publishing platform who have made their ebooks available via the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library and Kindle Unlimited. Hari Kunzru, author of The Impressionist, tweeted that he felt it was like the “thin end of a wedge.”
Making U-Turns
Whether or not Apple and Amazon decide to alter their plans is not yet known (“When you think you’ve changed your mind, you’d better change it back or we will both be sorry”, perhaps, as The Human League would put it), But we can be sure that they will ride out their storms (“shake it off, shake it off” as Taylor Swift would say). That’s because Apple sales are buoyant, and it’s moving in the right direction: protecting falling iTunes revenues by entering the rapidly maturing streaming market to provide some genuine competition.
In March this year, Apple was expected to be valued at more than a trillion dollars, some three times as much as Google and more than the GDP of Indonesia, the Netherlands and Saudi Arabia according to World Bank Statistics. Chinese interest and the Apple Watch is helping immensely and, anger over the delivery times aside, the wrist gadget has actually sold well. The Watch has also been wellreceived overall despite the Twitter vitriol (“haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate” – yeah, another Swift reference).
With the Apple Music backlash, at the very least Apple has shown that is listening. It knows that music fans are passionate people and that they support the artists they like with the same kind of fanboy and fangirl devotion that techies often reserve for their favourites. To that end, it has had to take the backlash to heart, certainly more so than it needed to do with the negative reaction to Apple Maps following the iOS 6 rollout in 2013; or those bendgate issues with the iPhone 6 Plus (“with normal use a bend in iPhone is extremely rare,” Apple told the BBC last year).
Apple rode those backlashes out, but it has had to develop a thick skin since. Whenever Apple produces something, the weight of scrutiny virtually guarantees that someone somewhere is going to find an issue that will keep the PR people working overtime. Some of the issues will be largely frivolous (the backlash over the dropping of Adobe Flash support was eventually overcome by web designers rejigging their sites), while others will always be more newsworthy and serious (the allegations of child labour at Apple’s Chinese suppliers’ factories springs to mind). There has been plenty to keep Apple busy, from antennagate in 2010, gripping the iPhone 4 in a certain way caused too many dropped calls, to updates in 2014 that disabled services and TouchID security. Most, it has to be said, are heretoday, gone-tomorrow issues.
It is near impossible for brands to be perfect and always act in the right way and since that’s never going to happen, it’s all about the speed of the remedy. In the case of the Apple Music furore, Apple appears to have taken Swift’s lyrics to heart (“I’m lightning on my feet”). In resolving the issue, the company is now able to “keep cruising.” For now it will, as Swift again sings, most likely be “Saying ‘It’s gonna be alright’.” Until the next backlash emerges, anyway.