Beggars Group (4AD, Matador, XL, Rough Trade) Says Apple Music Isn’t Playing Fair With Indie Labels

Apple will soon launch its new music service, Apple Music. The service will combine streaming, downloads, radio, and a social component. It will cost $9.99 per month, though it’s free for the first three months. Now, Beggars Group—the British record company that owns the labels 4AD, Matador, XL, Rough Trade, and Young Turks, among others—has written a statement addressing some problems they have with the service. Mainly, the fact that, as it stands now, rights holders will not be paid for streams during those first three months.

The statement says the company has yet to sign an agreement with Apple. “In many ways the deal structure is very progressive, but unfortunately it was created without reference to us, or as far as we know any independents, and as such unsurprisingly presents problems for us, and for our coming artist releases,” Beggars writes. “Whilst we understand the logic of their proposal and their aim to introduce a subscription-only service, we struggle to see why rights owners and artists should bear this aspect of Apple’s customer acquisition costs.”

They add, “And given the natural response of competing digital services to offer comparable terms, we fear that the free trial aspect, far from moving the industry away from freemium services – a model we support – is only resulting in taking the ‘mium’ out of freemium.”

The letter concludes on an optimistic note: “However, we very much hope that the obstacles to agreement can be removed, for us and for independent Merlin-member labels as a whole, and that we will be able to fully support this potentially exciting new service in the coming days.”

You can read the whole statement here.

Apple Music is set to launch June 30. 

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