Sony music publisher puts brakes on apples internet radio

"We want the service. We just want to be paid fairly."The influential music executive’s remarks are also the first confirmation that apple is working on such a streaming service at all. The heavyweight’s entry into the business could make life difficult for today’s suppliers.

Sony/ATV manages song rights for today’s stars like lady gaga and taylor swift, but also for music by old masters like the beatles or beach boys. The company is owned by the japanese electronics giant sony and the heirs of michael jackson. In the summer, it swallowed up the publishing division of the broken-up british music group EMI and now has around two million music rights. While the sound-carrier industry has been struggling with declining CD sales for years, music publishers are still a safe bet.

The wall street journal first reported on apple’s plans for an internet radio station a few weeks ago, while at the same time noting that it could be months before it is launched due to rights negotiations.

Apple is the world’s biggest music seller with its online platform itunes. However, streaming is becoming increasingly popular, where music is no longer downloaded but played directly from the internet. On the one hand, there are subscription services such as spotify or rdio, where music can be listened to without restriction for a monthly fee. Apple had also considered such a service, but rejected the idea, wrote the "wall street journal". Another model are free internet radios like pandora, where the user has to follow a playlist instead of choosing the songs himself.

The apple service, like pandora, was supposed to display advertisements for music, it was said. It should run on apple devices like iphones and ipads, and possibly windows pcs as well. According to the "new york post" apple is aiming for a more flexible license with more possibilities of use than with pandora. The first report in the "wall street journal" had already caused the share price of pandora to plummet.

Pandora is an example of how hard it is to make money with the business model – the company has massive problems recouping licensing costs. Most recently, in the first half of the fiscal year, which ended at the end of july, there was again a loss of 25.6 million dollars on just under 160 million dollars in revenue. The internet radio, which is almost exclusively active in the USA, has 54.9 million active users. Apple has the advantage that it is much more broadly positioned in its dealings with the music industry and can therefore negotiate better deals.