“I think ‘free’ was a terrible idea”: Apple Music VP says it is proud to not have a free subscription tierOliver Schusser, Vice President of Apple Music, thinks free music subscription tiers remain a “terrible idea”, and says Apple is proud to not offer one.
Schusser has compared the music streaming model to those for film and TV, and believes much higher numbers subscribe to these visual services rather than music services because platforms like Netflix and Disney+ do not offer free tiers, unlike music giants like Spotify.

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During his appearance on Billboard’s On the Record podcast, Schusser says, “I think “free” was a terrible idea. Apple Music is the only service that doesn’t have a free tier, and believe it or not, we are really proud of that.
“First of all, we really look at music like art… We think when an artist spends nine months in a studio to make a piece of [incredible] work, no one in the world should think it’s okay to give that away for free.”
He adds, “If you look at – I don’t know if you watched [Severance], which was, at the beginning of the year, the biggest and hottest TV show on the planet – the only way to watch [Severance] was, you have to sign up for Apple TV+… You can’t just go anywhere on the internet and consume all the shows for free.”
Schusser goes on to explain how the availability of free tiers means not enough people pay for music overall: “In my view: the fact that all paid services have to compete with free means not enough people are paying because they can get it for free, and the paid services can’t actually charge the correct price for the service because they’re always competing with free…”
He later adds, “I don’t want to comment on any of our competitors, but if you look at them in aggregate, the monetization of [a] free service is so poor and so little. It’s not like it’s paying the bills for them. I would argue it’s the cheapest marketing mechanism in the world, where the labels have given everyone the right to basically do free marketing – like, take all our content and use it for marketing and then upsell.”

In other Apple Music news, the platform is rolling out what it calls “Transparency Tags”, a system for flagging AI-generated content on its platform. On 4 March, Apple sent a newsletter to industry partners announcing that AI disclosures would now be a “delivery requirement” for content submitted to the service. The tags cover four categories: Artwork, Track, Composition, and Music Video, each intended to indicate when AI contributed a “material portion” of the work.
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