Trent Reznor and Dr. Dre launch their streaming music service
by Mark Teo
January 21, 2014
But let’s not get too excited, Canada. Not yet, at least.
Today, Beats Music, a brand new music streaming service headed by three music industry icons—Trent Reznor, Dr. Dre, and Interscope co-founder Jimmy Iovine—launches, and so far, it sounds promising. It’s slated to be a $10 subscription service, but it’s also more artist-focused than most streaming services: It’ll bolster its automated musicological analysis (the feature that, among other things, helps assemble recommendations) with hand-picked recommendations from curators. It’ll have no free tier, meaning that royalty rates for artists will be higher. And they’re rolling out a game called Right Now, a predictive feature that will assemble playlists based on, according to Consequence of Sound, “a place, an activity, a person, and a genre of music.”
Basically: Tell Beat Music that you’re looking for pre-drinking dance pop, downtempo ambient for work, or uptempo aggressive fare for the gym, and it’ll attempt to oblige.
Sounds like great news, right? Well, here’s the flipside: It’s not available for Canadians.
Of course, it’s not that we don’t have streaming services of our own. Rdio and Deezer, Canada’s subscription-based services, offer deep libraries, while Songza, a playlist-focused service that’s aggressively targeting Canadian advertising and audiences, offers up free streaming music. (With ads, of course.) But we’re still a long way off from seeing the other dominant streaming services—like Pandora, Spotify, or potentially Beats Music—compete north of the border.
The reason? Because these services haven’t struck agreements with Canadian music rights holders. Licensing fees have been deemed unprofitable for some companies—Pandora, in specific, has balked at the royalties being demanded in Canada, whose rates are far more expensive than the U.S. (Accrording to a 2010 Globe and Mail story, in America, webcasters pay two tenths of a cent per song streamed; the proposed rate in Canada was 7.5 tenths of a cent per song streamed, plus royalties paid to SOCAN. As cheap as that sounds, streaming music services are still in the red in the U.S.)
So no, it doesn’t seem likely that Beats Music will come to Canada.
“These rates … are astronomical,” Pandora’s founder, Tim Westergren, told the Canadian Press.
But there’s still hope yet. Streaming services that have launched in Canada have seen an overwhelming response; Songza has reported that 40 per cent of its users are in Canada, with nearly 3 million Canadian users. Rdio, meanwhile, is aggressively pursuing Canadian business by offering a free tiered component to Canadians—the type of thing Reznor’s Beats Music opposes—to attract more users. It’s clear that there’s a demand for streaming services in Canada, so your move, Beats Music.
Tags: Music, News, Beats Music, Dr. Dre, Trent Reznor