Apple Music head: “It’s crazy that music is offered free”
Image credit: Auguras Pipiras
Apple Music’s Global Head, Oliver Schusser has made it clear that he’s anti-ads in music streaming with a thinly veiled hit at competitors.
Apple Music‘s biggest rival, Spotify, has built a global lead in the music streaming landscape and a large part of their momentum has been powered by an ad-supported tier. Spotify’s free to access, ad-supported music streaming offering is offered as a springboard for new users to try streaming before upgrading to go ad-free.
However, Apple Music’s Global Head has hit out against ad-supported streaming. Oliver Schusser said: “It’s crazy that 20 years on, music is still offered free. We’re the only service that doesn’t have a free service. That’s not because of the money or anything. As a company, we look at music as art and we would never want to give away art for free. It just makes no sense to me.”
On launch, Apple Music originally planned not to pay artists for streams made during free trials of their platform. Those plans were reneged upon, however since launch Apple Music have offered free trials of their service. Music playback isn’t interrupted by adverts on the free trial, and presumably streams are paid out on the same rate as paying users.
With 675 million monthly active users on Spotify and 263 million premium subscribers, the majority of Spotify users are still ad-suppoted listeners. As the biggest music streaming service in the world and a direct rival to Apple Music, Schusser’s words are a blatant hit against Spotify and what he deems an old fashioned model.
Regardless, Spotify paid a record $10 billion to the music industry in 2024. That amounts to the largest payout any music retailer has ever paid into the music industry in just one year. So, whilst a lot of that will come from Premium payments a significant portion likely also comes from ad-supported streaming.
You could argue that that money would not be paid out to artists, labels, and rightsholders if Spotify free wasn’t available. Casual listeners who may not care to listen to music ad-free, perhaps would simply abstain if not provided the ease of Spotify’s free tier.
However, many argue that making music available for free – on-demand – devalues music. In a climate in which it is not always easy for artists to earn a living wage, any potential weakening of music’s value can hit hard. In particular since Spotify announced that they would no longer pay out for songs generating less than 1,000 streams, hitting small, independent artists the hardest.
Spotify’s significant contributions to the industry cannot be understated, though. Particularly when they revealed that roughly 50% of their payouts last year went to independent artists. Spotify launched at a time when music industry revenues were plummeting due to piracy, killing the traditional physical route. Since then, we have seen an industry reshaped – and maybe free streaming has a place within that new world.