Apple has always boasted of the amount it allocates to pay artists for the music offered by its streaming music platforms. Apple has always tried to win the interest of record companies with that premise and we could say that in part it has done quite well based on the number of subscribers it currently has, 15 million. But it is also helping him to reach agreements with record companies and artists to offer new albums before anyone else. The last of them that of Frank Ocean. Offering more money to artists and record labels for their music allows the company to be in a position to negotiate exclusive releases, releases that will cost the Cupertino-based company a good deal of money.
Record companies want to be in all possible streaming music media in order to make their productions more profitable. Currently Apple is paying record companies 58% of the profits to record companies, while Spotify is paying 55%, but it intends to be able to reduce that percentage to 50%. The problem that Spotify faces is that the major labels: Sony, Universal Music and Warner Music want Spotify to match the amount that Apple is currently paying for its music service.
This is a problem for Spotify since despite wanting to enter the war of exclusives, as we published a few days ago, it is not in a position to be able to demand when its main intention is to reduce the amount it pays to record companies. It is clear that Apple has enough kidney to withstand this war, a war that can only harm users since if any of these record companies decided to stop offering their catalog in the Swedish firm, something very unlikely, the users of this platform they would be the ones who would suffer the collateral damage of the war between the two streaming music giants of the current panorama.
