it House News on February 3, Apple announced last week that in order to encourage more authors to create "spatial audio" music, it plans to pay an additional 10% royalty to for spatial audio tracks. According to the Financial Times, several independent record labels are concerned about this, and believes that it will not benefit from it.
Many independent record companies believe that the original intention of Apple's incentive measures is good, but the actual implementation process will deviate from expectations, causing this extra royalties to flow to famous superstars and away from other musicians who have no resources to compete.
A senior executive at a major independent record label said:
This is literally taking money out of independent labels and their artists to benefit the biggest companies in the market.
Apple’s move benefits copyright giants such as Universal Music, as only they have enough resources to invest in spatial audio; while for independent record companies, or newcomers who have just started out without resources, it is difficult to have the motivation to produce spatial audio.
Independent record company executives said that using spatial audio to produce music is not cheap: each song costs an additional US$1,000 (it home note: currently about 7,180 yuan), and each album costs about US$10,000 (currently about 71,800 yuan) yuan), while the cost of remastering old tracks may double.
Independent record labels said they hope to work with Apple to make changes to the new policy. People familiar with the matter told ft they would pursue legal or regulatory avenues if negotiations failed.
