What's happening here is not a shift to net 90, and it's also not an attempt by Apple to rip any rightsholders off.
Instead, it appears Apple and the major labels believe that three free months of Apple Music threatens to hurt Spotify's userbase growth at a crucial time for Spotify (fundraising pre-IPO). The industry has lost its faith in freemium (Apple Music, trial aside, has no free tier) and either this will kill Spotify or get them in line.
The indies, who overall can't afford losing three months of revenue, are just caught in the cross fire.
I think you're mistaken if you think that the majors would voluntarily relinquish three months of royalties from trials of Apple Music just to hurt Spotify, when they could simply pull their content from Spotify a la Taylor Swift to hurt it much more. This is Apple trying to push costs wherever they can and ignoring the indies during negotiation. It wouldn't be the first time that indies get the raw deal from a large corporate making decisions with the majors in mind.
The indies, who overall can't afford losing three months of revenue, are just caught in the cross fire.
People keep saying this. Is there much evidence to support it? It's very understandable that they don't want to forgo revenue, but that is not the same as being unable to continue operating with the lower revenue.
How about you forgo getting paid for your work for three months to help your employer out? Will you die as a result, probably not, so we're all good right?
I did say I understood why they do not want to do it, I'm still curious what the actual impact on their revenues would be (or can we not talk about that because the situation involves a bigger company that has lots of money?).
There's nothing in the contract between Sony and Spotify that's all that surprising. Even the large looking advance of $45M is only a small fraction of what Spotify would have paid Sony each year.
If anything, the "unfairness" of the contract terms is a reflection of the HUGE amount of leverage the record labels have because their content is so valuable. Is it evil for the labels to attempt to maximize their profit while minimizing Spotify's?
21 will surely dole out some of their 75% cut to hardware integration partners as a distribution fee. The ripoff here is for anyone ignorant enough to run one of these devices.
This may underrate the real difficulty of Spotify: convincing record labels to let them give away music for free on the assumption freemium would have a reasonable conversion rate to paid.
Developers that build products on top of APIs controlled by other companies, particularly recent startups, are routinely abused. The upside of these products is unnaturally clipped due to moral hazard on the part of the API provider. That is, closed APIs incentivize their providers to farm out testing new products based on their data set to others, then reimplement the most successful products themselves, and finally cut off access to the developer because it's now a 'competitor'. This pattern has (allegedly) played out with several of the big closed API providers.
This behavior has a double benefit to the API provider, because it potentially turns would be direct competitors who would otherwise work on an alternative to its core technology if not provided with an API into unpaid new product idea validators that leave the API provider the option of crippling their product at will. That's a lot of competitive advantage, especially in markets dominated by network and first mover effects.
As a developer, it's prudent to be skeptical of closed API providers, because developer time is valuable, and the incentives of API providers and consumers are not aligned.
An API has to be extremely valuable in order to overcome these structural issues, and it appears that developers didn't regard these APIs as sufficiently valuable. So in my mind, the blame for this failure doesn't lie with the developers that failed to use the APIs, but with the company that didn't provide a sufficiently attractive API.
Maybe or maybe not. We don't know what the exact numbers were and what they needed to be to keep them in tact. They may have deprecated them anyway to keep a single SDK (at least that's kind of the impression I got though if the usage was high the timeline would probably be longer and more features would be in the core SDK).
It's easy to lambast someone because someone didn't want to rely on another's API but it's a very good point to bring up. Big companies such as Google regularly kill things people use and start-ups are encouraged to think fast, test fast; I have a hard time wanting to rely on either for my business.
We don't know the right scale of desired adoption. For some companies 10k users is a lot but for others like Google, even with tenth of millions [1] they shutdown services like Google Reader.
Number of users using an API does not determine if it's deprecated or not. If they are making more money (directly or indirectly) than they are spending to run/maintain the API is what determines it most times. There are countless examples of heavily used API's being pulled, Twitter and Netflix spring to mind...
Roughly, "hearsay" means that the person testifying to a fact was not a witness to it themselves or does not have direct knowledge over it. So it's entirely possible that some parts of the affidavit are hearsay while others are acceptable testimony.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connect_Four