Who is itunes competitors

Until now, the worlds of streaming music and streaming music videos have been largely separate: Spotify and the rest on one side, and YouTube, Vevo, MTV, Vimeo etc on the other. But there is potential for these two worlds to come together, and it's happening in outside Apple in any case. Example one: YouTube's long-rumoured plans to launch a music subscription service to build on its status already as the world's largest streaming music service. It's expected to make its debut imminently.

Example two: Scandinavian streaming service WiMP, which recently added music videos to its catalogue of streaming audio. But once video enters music streaming — as I am sure it will this year for all the major players — artists get paid as much for a video stream as they get paid for an audio stream. So artists and labels should be thinking how they can benefit from that.

How about an album that only exists as a video? Back to Apple, which already sells music videos alongside audio tracks on its iTunes Store. The potential is there to build on this, and encourage labels and artists to "play with the formats" under the iTunes banner.

Perhaps it could bundle regular livestreams into the cost of an iTunes streaming subscription, with competitions to win tickets to see the gigs in the flesh to build buzz beforehand.

Finally, if there's one claim that's open to competition in in the streaming music world, it's which service is best for musicians. Spotify spent much of fending off criticism that the money paid out from streams wasn't enough for artists to survive and prosper. Cue Thom Yorke calling it "the last desperate fart of a dying corpse" said corpse being the major label-dominated music industry or David Byrne asking whether streaming services are "simply a legalised version of file-sharing sites such as Napster and Pirate Bay — with the difference being that with streaming services the big labels now get hefty advances".

That debate has ramped up the pressure on streaming services to show themselves as being more artist-friendly, including Spotify publishing details of how its payouts are calculated , launching analytics to help musicians better understand how their music is being streamed, and allowing them to sell merchandise from their profiles. See also Beats Music promising that it is "paying the same royalty rate to all content owners major and indie alike" while its chief creative officer and Nine Inch Nail Trent Reznor said that "Beats Music is based on the belief that all music has value and this concept was instilled in every step of its development.

We want it to be just as meaningful for artists as it is for fans". As that debate raged, Apple kept quiet in public, but behind the scenes has been stoking the arguments by reminding big artists of the rewards that are still available from download sales. That will present a challenge when Apple launches its own on-demand streaming service.

But if it wants to disrupt rivals by charging a lower monthly subscription price, the economics will struggle to be sold as artist-friendly — unless Apple quickly signs up for example 50m people to pay for its service. Being artist-friendly may be about more than payouts, though. How can Apple help musicians to sell tickets, t-shirts and vinyl, for example? How can it help them to raise money from their fans in direct donations to fund their next album or tour — imagine, for a second, the waves if Apple were to buy a crowdfunding company like Pledge Music or even Kickstarter for this purpose?

What sort of data could Apple share with musicians to help them plan their tours? These are all questions that established streaming services are trying to answer too, with a clutch of startups trying to help who'd be buyable for — in Apple's financial world — pocket change.

If Apple is planning to make any big moves in streaming music, its WWDC event in June would be the most likely time to announce them, as part of the anticipated unveiling of the next version of its iOS software, iOS 8.

Apple could certainly make a big splash in the streaming music world, but it will face much stiffer competition than in some of those historical examples iPod, iTunes etc where it trumped established competitors who'd been doing a clunky job. Labels and publishers — especially in the US — are notoriously leaky, so expect a few more rumours about the dealmaking process and likely features for a streaming iTunes in the coming months.

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Investopedia is part of the Dotdash publishing family. In early , Jobs left Apple for a short. Since becoming popular iTunes has had to compete with many music competitors.

These music competitors included Napster, RealNetworks, Inc. All of these companies provide the same music. However, these companies provide music for a minimal fee or free. For example, up until Napster subscribers were able to download music for free with an account and an internet connection.