Music distribution service TuneCore has described the royalties from iTunes Match as "magic money that Apple made exist out of thin air for copyright holders," signaling early support of the service from one part of the music industry. TuneCore CEO Jeff Price made the proclamation in a blog post on Tuesday, making the first iTunes Match royalty payments sound like nothing less than a miracle. Without any details on how much individual musicians are taking home, however, it's not clear whether iTunes Match pays better or worse than similar services.
TuneCore is a service used by many independent musicians and artists that allows them to distribute their music on major music stores like iTunes and Amazon. The idea is to use TuneCore's resources—instead of the artist's limited resources—to achieve wider distribution to a major audience, and for what amounts to as a minimal cost to the musician. TuneCore isn't the only service that does this—CD Baby is another popular option—but it remains one of the larger collectives of indie musicians online.
In his blog post, Price said the total amount of the first royalties received by TuneCore on behalf of musicians was $10,000, which was collected over a period of two months since the beginning of iTunes Match. This may come off as a bit low, considering that TuneCore represents huge numbers of independent musicians, but Price defended the number by stating, "before you were getting zero, now you are getting something."
"A person has a song on her computer hard drive. She clicks on the song and plays it. No one is getting paid," Price wrote. "The same person pays iTunes $25 for iMatch. She now clicks on the same song and plays it through her iMatch service. Copyright holders get paid."
It's worth noting that musicians who sell their music through iTunes end up being paid twice if they also receive royalties through iTunes Match—once at the time of purchase, another time after the user begins listening through iTunes Match. This also applies if the user purchased a physical CD, ripped it, and then used iTunes to match those tracks so they can be streamed to other devices. And in the unfortunate event that the original music was pirated and then became "legitimized" through iTunes Match—which some people believe is the entire purpose of the service—then the "something is better than nothing" approach may have some merit.
Of course, Price didn't break down where the royalties will go—undoubtedly, there will be some musicians raking in more than others, and there will be lots who barely make anything at all. But even musicians who are only making a fraction of a dollar on streaming royalties seem to appreciate the token payments in exchange for greater levels of exposure. For example, in a blog post authored last November, Matt Churchill wrote about the royalties he received from Routenote (another music distribution service similar to TuneCore), noting that just over 100 "plays" of his song netted a total of 65¢. "Now that might not seem like much to you, but that 100 plays is 100 more than we would have had otherwise," Churchill wrote.
Little is known about how much iTunes Match pays out per-play to record labels and distribution companies, but it's probable that it compares to other popular streaming services like Spotify. (Indie musicians aren't always happy about Spotify's "tiny" royalties, though according to Billboard, they are greater than royalties received from radio broadcasts.) Either way, it's clear that at least for TuneCore, the general feeling is that iTunes Match is so far working out.
"The music industry needs innovation. Services like iMatch, Spotify, Simfy, Deezer and others are bringing that innovation—it will take some time to learn which are the ones consumers want," Price wrote. "But in the interim, seeing an additional $10,000+ appear out of the thin air for TuneCore Artists by people just listening to songs they already own is amazing!"
Listing image by Photograph by Simon Harrod
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