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Comment by unfamiliar | Hacker News Reader

>we struggle to see why rights owners and artists should bear this aspect of Apple’s customer acquisition costs

This. If Apple wants to draw people to their music service with a free 3 month trial, they should be ponying up the cash for those 3 months, or at least part of it since this is ultimately a mutually beneficial arrangement. Expecting labels to pay for the richest corporation on earth to attract people to its new music service seems wrong.

The artists releasing things in this quarter are going to be the worst affected. I know that I won't be purchasing any new music in the next 3 months.

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> ...or at least part of it since this is ultimately a mutually beneficial arrangement.

I agree with most of your comment but wanted to flag this...

I don't think it's that mutually beneficial. Apple gets the reward of stealing valuable market share from Spotify, Rdio, etc. The labels just receive a different flavor of what they already have: Access to a streaming service that people subscribe to.

Apple is supposedly paying ~1.5 points more than Spotify, so labels would presumably get _some_ benefit from consumers moving to Apple Music. If the consumers they convert come from any other service's free tier — which is admittedly unlikely to be a huge amount — the effect would be even more pronounced.

3 months seems long enough to be suspect. What other apple services have had that long of a free intro period?

MobileMe was supposed to have a 2 month free trial that became a 3 month free trial due to the glitches during launch (and some people even got 4 months due to a payment screwup where they were billed for the full year in advance rather than a token authorization)

I don't see how the amount of money Apple has in the bank matters here.

Apple is going up against well-entrenched incumbents. It would be a good idea for it to use those cash reserves in order to carve out a space in streaming-land, if that's something it wants to get into. See also: Microsoft and the XBox - how many years was it before that broke even?

Throwing money at labels alienated from Spotify and co may or may not be a good use of that money, but given the amount of griping going around, it could be worth a shot. That's between the respective beancounters of Apple and the labels.

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