The False Promise of the Pay-Per-Download Model
Last night, Apple announced that U2’s new album would be given away for free to all iTunes users worldwide (in countries where iTunes operates). Apple estimated the album could reach 500 million people — most of them owners of Apple devices. An extraordinary number.
Unfortunately, the claim “Available exclusively on iTunes” was never going to hold. There is no force in the world capable of keeping any album contained to a single platform. And so, within hours of the announcement — well within the 25-day exclusivity window Apple had paid Universal (U2’s label) for — Songs of Innocence was available everywhere: not just on iTunes and iTunes Radio, but on Beats and beyond.
That said, “Never before have so many people owned one album, let alone on the day of its release” — that part is true. And it’s good news for the music industry. For the first time, an album was delivered simultaneously to listeners all over the world, thanks to the infrastructure Apple could bring to bear while millions of fans downloaded at once.
But even that framing contains a false promise: the word “owned.” From a legal standpoint, no one can “own” a U2 album unless U2 sells it (see my earlier piece on this). Apple and the other stakeholders who benefit from the pay-per-download model are holding back a tide. If they weren’t so invested in protecting it, streaming would already have enough users and enough market momentum to generate significantly more revenue than it currently does.
We’ll never know what could have been. But what we’re witnessing now is a rearguard action — an attempt to preserve the status quo.
Why bring streaming into this? Because unlike iTunes, “available to stream exclusively on Spotify” is actually a true statement. Many artists release albums as Spotify exclusives. If the rights holder doesn’t give other platforms streaming rights, the album genuinely can only be streamed there. Yes, someone could theoretically record it and distribute a file illegally — but what’s being offered to the consumer is the Spotify experience itself: the ecosystem, the features, the playlist integration.
With a download, you just get the file. You can play it in Winamp if you want (and if you’re a Spotify user, comparing the two experiences is an insult to Spotify).
The Bigger Picture
The music industry — aided by technology companies and the internet revolution — still offers listeners an enormous range of ways to consume music: vinyl, CD, cassette, streaming via services like Spotify, Deezer, or Guvera, or paid downloads through iTunes. This is genuinely good news. Unlike the old days, listeners are no longer forced to follow the industry’s standards.
But companies with the scale and influence to shape global trends — like Apple — still exert enormous control over how markets engage with music. They will keep steering the industry through the channels that benefit them most: iTunes and Apple hardware.
It may be wishful thinking, but I genuinely hope Apple turns out to be the last company with this level of power over the music industry. Because the industry deserves space to keep evolving — to keep finding business models and concepts that can survive the storms of change, rather than being held back by anyone’s vested interest in the past.
Update: As it turned out, Apple and U2 failed to override anyone’s musical taste.