It’s ‘Crazy’ Other Streaming Services Offer Free Music Tiers

Oliver Schusser, Apple Music’s top executive, said it’s “crazy” that other music streaming platforms continue to offer free consumer tiers and suggested it devalues music as a form of art.

Speaking with National Music Publishers Assn. CEO David Israelite during the organization’s annual meeting on June 11, Schusser, vice president of Apple Music and International Content, said, “I think it’s crazy that 20 years in, we still offer music for free. We’re the only service that doesn’t have a free service. As a company, we look at music as art, and we would never want to give away art for free.”

He likened Apple’s music streaming model to its parent company’s business model for television streaming service Apple TV+. “Let me give you an example,” he said. “In January we added the most successful show in the world on AppleTV +. It’s called ‘Severance.’ You know what you have to do to watch ‘Severance’? You had to sign up to Apple TV+ and pay $10. It isn’t available anywhere for free,” he said.

Pointing to Gracie Abrams – who accepted the Billboard Breakthrough Songwriter of Year award at the event, and Kacey Musgraves, who was honored with this year’s NMPA Songwriter Icon Award – Schusser added, “So I don’t understand why Gracie’s album would be available for free, or Kacey’s. It makes no sense. We don’t have a free service, we will not have one, we have no plans for one.”

Schusser’s comments come as tensions persist between the music industry and the streaming platforms, where songwriters are still often splitting pennies per play, and new offerings are exacerbating the situation.

Spotify last year began offering subscriptions that bundle music with audiobooks, a move Amazon Music has recently parroted.

“The songwriting and music publishing community has been in what seems like a never-ending dispute with Spotify, a company that’s constantly attacking songwriters and trying to cut what they pay,” said Israelite. “And now Amazon is also bundling and we’ve seen a reduction of royalties in the last few months.”

At the meeting, NMPA executive VP and general counsel Danielle Aguirre put numbers behind those losses. “We lost over $230 million” last year as a direct result of Spotify’s bundles, she noted, and in the first three months since Amazon started bundling, “we’ve seen a 40 percent decrease in music revenue from Amazon.”

Israelite shared that music publishing revenue in the U.S. grew 17 percent to more than $7 billion last year, but suggested that growth would be more significant if strenuous government regulation such as mechanical royalties weren’t a factor.