Report..Apple Wants It Free From Music Labels

Apple has been visiting music labels to make deals, but those hard-nosed negotiators from Cupertino want the moon and the stars, accoridng to The NY Post.

Turns out Apple loves free just as much as Spotify.

The tech giant wants to offer a three-month free trial period for its $10-a-month subscription service to get customers to sample its new offering. So far so good, but it also wants the labels to give it rights for free during that time.

The request from the most valuable brand on the planet comes at a time when music buyers might opt to ditch the downloads in order to try a new free offering, creating a potential quarterly revenue shortfall for rights owners.

As for music publishers, The Post reports Apple wanted to offer lyrics as part of Apple Music, but didn’t want to pay extra — again, free is nice if you can get it.

Apple’s plans appear aimed at taking the best of Pandora, Spotify and YouTube and blending it into something that will outgun them all. There are plans for streaming music (and video), artists’ pages, a YouTube-style post-it-yourself destination called Apple Connect and a well-documented reboot of iTunes Radio.