Apple To Pay Between $100 Million & $150 Million In Advanced Payments To Labels
by Joe White
June 3, 2011
Apple reportedly has four major music labels on board for iCloud, but how much did that cost the Cupertino, CA company? According to a recent article by The New York Times, Apple is paying each company between $25 million and $50 million in advanced payments, meaning the company could "fork over between $100 million and $150 million" in total.
As reported by The New York Times:
Apple will fork over between $100 million and $150 million in advanced payments to the four major music labels in order to get its iCloud off the ground, three separate sources told The Post. The Cupertino, Calif., tech giant has agreed to pay the labels between $25 million to $50 million each, as an incentive to get on board, depending on how many tracks consumers are storing. The size of the advance payments have been a major hold-up for Google, which had been negotiating with the music companies and now will likely have to pony up higher fees to get a rival cloud service into action, said music industry sources.Indeed, this agreement with music labels is what may give Apple's cloud-based service the edge over competitors. During Eric Schmidt's interview at the D9 event, the Google CEO noted that Google and music labels "couldn't come to terms." This is why Google's cloud-based music service "does not scan-and-match users' music library and prevents people from downloading files once they’re up in the cloud," as noted by 9to5Mac. With regards to pricing, we heard yesterday that iCloud would be free for a limited time. However, following this trial period, users would have to subscribe to the cloud-based service for $25/year, according to the Los Angeles Times. I'm certainly very excited to discover exactly what Apple's cloud-based service will offer. And with WWDC 2011 only a few days away, we haven't got long to wait until we find out. Feel free to share your expectations in the comments!
