I recently joined Apple music. For those of you who are not familiar with it, it’s a music service that provides music for your specific taste on any device at any time. It has a modest $10/month fee after a free 3 month trial period. It learns your taste by you clicking on “like” buttons on specific styles and songs. For me as a consumer I must say I really like it. It got me listening to music again, rediscovering old tunes I used to love when I was younger, as well as finding new artists I am not familiar with. 
I have been looking for a way to find new music for a while. I don’t listen to radio at home, I’m not really set up for it. The only radio I have is in my car and I prefer listening to NPR when I drive or to reference mixes of songs I am working on. Also, because I work in my studio on music every day, I like to give my ears a rest and not listen to music when I take a break. Radio has just fallen short of getting me excited about music. There is too much stuff I don’t want to hear in between the one or two great songs.
Not so with Apple music. The cool thing is, that if there is a song in the playlist I don’t like I can just skip it and if there is something I like I can research the artist and similar music further. For me $10/ month is like buying 1 album download per month. And that’s totally worth the price of getting excited about music again.
The big question is, how are the revenues distributed to the artists providing the music. 10 years ago I read an interesting book by Dave Kusek and Gerd Leonhard, entitled The Future of Music: Manifesto for the Digital Music Revolution
In this book the authors suggest the following model. Music will be available on tap anywhere (not unlike the Apple Music) and customers would be billed a utility fee, like a water bill. It should be possible to determine how much music was consumed and bill the customer accordingly. It should also be possible to determine who was listened to and compensate the artists accordingly. That second part, which is very important to me being an artist myself, is still a big gray are in todays world.
I like Apple music a lot and I don’t mind paying the monthly fee for this service, but I need to be assured, that the money gets distributed to the artists, whose music I enjoy. I’ll keep you posted if I find out more.
In the meantime, please feel free to comment. I would be most interested to hear what you think about this subject.
