It appears that a new foe has entered the music wars, one that nobody anticipated coming: the artists. If you are a bit confused about what we mean by the music wars, then we suggest reading our blog post Apple vs. Spotify.

Last week, Apple announced that they would be offering a 3-month free trial to their new music streaming service Apple Music. From a marketing standpoint, this is a smart way to reach a very broad audience base that is somewhat wary to try a subscription based model. Taking a page out of the MMORPG subscription model was a very smart choice on the part of Apple in the hopes of converting these consumers to actual subscribers.

Their misstep occurred when they drew the ire of T. Swift. After making their announcement of the three month free trial, it came to light that the artists would not receive royalties for any plays that their songs received during that trial.

Needless to say, a lot of artists were upset.

Adele’s label pulled out instantly and very quietly. Taylor Swift, on the other hand, took to social media in an open letter to Apple. Swift’s comments almost instantly went viral as her ravenous supporters agreed with her. Just over 15 hours passed before Apple recanted and said they would pay royalties to the artists during that trial, albeit at a lower rate.

The old adage is that there is no such thing as bad publicity, but in this case it would seem that there is already a pending distrust of Apple Music. Do you think this is the case or will people still flock to it in droves?

Clearly a lot of us were wrong about a lot of things.

Today, you are hard pressed to find anyone that doesn’t have an iTunes account. It has become so universal that South Park has even made satire it. In their latest earnings call, Tim Cook reported that there are over 800 million iTunes accounts.

However, as the monolith that is iTunes and Apple chugged away at our wallets .99 cents at a time, a small startup called Spotify was slowly gaining momentum after its founding in 2008. Spotify, if you are unfamiliar, is a music streaming service based on the freemium model. This means that you can listen to music for free so long as you listen to advertisements occasionally (the “free “option) and if you pay a monthly fee you can listen add free (the premium option). To date, Spotify is valued at over 8 billion dollars and has 70 million users.

On Monday June 8^th, Apple announced that they would be entering into the music streaming market with the cleverly titled Apple Music app. Apple’s model only touts the monthly subscription but is banking on their brand, marketing and artist/DJ offerings to help them close the gap between them an Spotify. 

In response to their announcement made Monday, Spotify has reportedly raised over half a billion dollars from investors in order to maintain their lead in the market. Apple Music is set to be released at the end of the month in 100 markets.

Do you think Spotify’s lead will help them maintain their dominance, or will Apple’s marketing be able to close the distance?