In today's CMU Daily: The EU has fined Apple €1.8 billion following an antitrust investigation into its App Store rules. This is the result of a complaint filed by Spotify in 2019. The fine is likely to be subject to legal wrangling for many years to come, but Spotify will be most keen on what investigators said about Apple’s anti-steering regulations

One Liners: Plugged In appointment; ASCAP revenues; un:hurd investment; Artist & Manager Awards details; Sinead O’Connor estate urges Donald Trump to stop using ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’; Brixton Academy to reopen in April; Killer Mike UK shows; new music from Tomorrow X Together, Pelican and Laura J Martin

Also today: Raye’s record breaking BRIT Awards haul; Stability AI’s defence against copyright infringement action by Getty Images; and the YouTube Music staff made redundant while urging local politicians to support them in gaining union representation

Plus: This week’s Setlist podcast, and the new Pathways Into Music professional development programme

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EU fines €1.8 billion at end of Spotify initiated competition law investigation

The European Union has fined Apple more than €1.8 billion for "abusing its dominant position" in relation to the distribution of music streaming apps for iOS devices. The fine - nearly four times bigger than initially reported and the third biggest fine ever imposed by the EU in relation to a breach of competition law - is the outcome of an investigation that was kickstarted by a complaint from Spotify.

"For a decade, Apple abused its dominant position in the market for the distribution of music streaming apps through the App Store", says Margrethe Vestager, Executive Vice-President in charge of competition policy at the European Commission. "They did so by restricting developers from informing consumers about alternative, cheaper music services available outside of the Apple ecosystem. This is illegal under EU antitrust rules, so today we have fined Apple over €1.8 billion".

Apple will appeal the fine - which is roughly 1.36% of its $143.5 billion of current assets, often referred to as Apple's "cash pile" - resulting in years of legal wrangling. Though for Spotify the more important part of today's announcement is the EC's order that Apple should axe the App Store rules that stop app developers from sign-posting payment options outside of their apps.

That said, it remains to be seen how Apple complies with that order and to what extent it is useful for Spotify and other app developers. Apple has already amended those rules in order to comply with the new EU Digital Markets Act. However, it has introduced extra conditions which, Spotify says, means app developers are no better off. So the new order from the EC will only have an impact if Apple is also prohibited from applying any new additional conditions.

Spotify, and others, have long criticised the App Store rule that forces many app developers to take in-app payments via Apple's own commission-charging transactions system. They also oppose Apple's anti-steering provisions, which is what stops the sign-posting within an app of other payment options. So, for example, Spotify can't direct users to its website for payments, where it can sell subscriptions or other digital products without paying any commission to Apple.

It was the anti-steering provision that became the focus of the EC's investigation, which began with a formal complaint from Spotify in 2019. "The Commission's investigation found that Apple bans music streaming app developers from fully informing iOS users about alternative and cheaper music subscription services available outside of the app and from providing any instructions about how to subscribe to such offers", the EC said this morning.

Given Apple's initial commission on in-app payments would pretty much wipe out Spotify's profit margin, the streaming service basically had two choices. Either to pass Apple's commission onto the customer, making Spotify look more expensive than Apple Music. Or to not allow people to sign-up for premium within its iOS app, negatively impacting user experience. Spotify initially passed the commission on and then stopped selling premium subscriptions in-app.

The EC reckons that the outcome of either approach negatively impacts consumers. Option one "may have led many iOS users to pay significantly higher prices for music streaming subscriptions because of the high commission fee imposed by Apple on developers and passed on to consumers". With option two there was "non-monetary harm in the form of a degraded user experience".

"Today's decision concludes that Apple's anti-steering provisions amount to unfair trading conditions, in breach of Article 102(a) of the Treaty On The Functioning Of The European Union", the EU's statement continues. "These anti-steering provisions are neither necessary nor proportionate for the protection of Apple's commercial interests in relation to the App Store on Apple's smart mobile devices and negatively affect the interests of iOS users, who cannot make informed and effective decisions on where and how to purchase music streaming subscriptions for use on their device".

In calculating the €1.8 billion fine, the EC says it "took into account the duration and gravity of the infringement" and the fact that "Apple submitted incorrect information in the framework of the administrative procedure". Perhaps most importantly, it considered Apple's massive turnover and market capitalisation, which means a mega-fine is required if it is to be any kind of deterrent.

Beyond the fine element, the EC also says that it has "ordered Apple to remove the anti-steering provisions and to refrain from repeating the infringement or from adopting practices with an equivalent object or effect in the future".

While that order is more important than the fine to Spotify, it remains to be seen how Apple goes about complying with it. In theory the Digital Markets Act - which goes fully into effect this month - forces a similar change to the rules. But Apple has added new conditions for app developers sign-posting other payment options which, Spotify argues, means it is no better off.

And it's not only Spotify taking that position. Last week an assortment of other tech companies and trade organisations - including Deezer and trade group Digital Music Europe - joined Spotify in signing an open letter which declared that "Apple’s new terms not only disregard both the spirit and letter of the law, but if left unchanged, make a mockery of the DMA and the considerable efforts by the European Commission and EU institutions to make digital markets competitive".

It remains to be seen the extent to which the new order from the European Commission forces Apple to change its anti-steering rules in a way that is actually useful to Spotify et al, while it continues to appeal the ruling and the mega-fine.

AEG Europe // Strategy And Insights Analyst (London)

AEG Presents // Tour Accountant, International Touring (London)

Kilimanjaro Live // Event Coordinator (London Hybrid)

Horizon is CMU's new weekly newsletter - published each Friday - that brings you a hand-picked selection of early-stage career opportunities from across the music industry.

Whether you're looking for your first job in music or you're ready to take a step up, Horizon is here to help you find your dream job faster.

👉 Click through to see the current selection.

ONE LINERS

Sinead O’Connor, Brixton Academy, Tomorrow X Together + more

APPOINTMENTS

Music promotions agency Plugged In has hired Alice Mortimer to head up its new publicity department. “We’ve been fans of Alice’s work for some time, having had the pleasure of working alongside her on artist campaigns during which we’ve been impressed by how thorough, professional and tenacious she is when it comes to securing exposure for her artists”, says MD James Passmore.

LABELS & PUBLISHERS

US collecting society ASCAP has announced 2023 revenues of $1.737 billion, up 14.1% year-on-year. $1.592 billion of that will be paid out in royalties to its writer and publisher partners. “We are delivering industry-leading technical innovation, legislative advocacy and revenue growth that solely benefits our members, not outside investors or shareholders”, says chief exec Elizabeth Matthews, taking a stab at now private equity owned rival BMI.

Artist marketing platform un:hurd has raised new funding from Kobalt Music founder Willard Ahdritz, Musiiio co-founder Hazel Savage, Nigerian musician Mr Eazi, and producer Sam Feldt. Ahdritz says he has “very much enjoyed the last twelve months” working with founder Alex Brees and his team, adding, “I wanted to step up on my commitment to un:hurd to support the new developments that have the potential to change the game for independent artists in the marketplace”.

AWARDS

The Artist & Manager Awards, presented by the MMF and FAC,will return to London’s Bloomsbury Big Top on Thursday 21 Nov 2024. “The Artist & Manager Awards is a real high point in the calendar”, say MMF CEO Annabella Coldrick and FAC CEO David Martin. “It’s a particularly busy time of year, so we’re encouraging all to save the date now for 2024’s ceremony and look forward to delivering another special celebration of our community. Please get in touch now if you wish to sponsor an award or reserve a table”.

ARTISTS NEWS

The estate of Sinéad O’Connor and Chrysalis Records have issued a joint statement urging Donald Trump to stop using ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ at his political rallies. “It is no exaggeration to say that Sinéad would have been disgusted, hurt and insulted to have her work misrepresented in this way by someone who she herself referred to as a ‘biblical devil’”, they say. “As the guardians of her legacy, we demand that Donald Trump and his associates desist from using her music immediately”.

GIGS & FESTIVALS

Brixton Academy has announced its first show since being forced to close in December 2022 after a fatal crowd crush incident. The gig, on 19 Apr, will feature four tribute acts playing the hits of Foo Fighters, Oasis, The Smiths and Nirvana. Tickets will go on general sale on Friday.

Killer Mike has announced UK shows in Glasgow, London and Manchester this August. Tickets go on general sale on Friday.

RELEASES

Tomorrow X Together have announced that they will release new mini-album ‘Minisode 3: Tomorrow’ on 1 Apr. Here's a short trailer, if that’s your sort of thing.

Pelican have put out new two track EP ‘Tending The Embers’. It’s their first music with original guitarist Laurent Schroeder-Lebec since 2012.

Laura J Martin has released new single ‘Prepared’. Her new album of the same name is out on 17 May.

YouTube Music staff laid off in middle of meeting about employment rights with Austin City Council

Members of a YouTube Music team based in Austin, Texas found out that they had been laid off while urging the city's council to pass a resolution that would ask the company to negotiate with their union. The employees have been in dispute over the last year with YouTube and owner Google - and its parent company Alphabet - regarding new rules restricting remote working and a refusal to bargain with union representatives.

Jack Benedict, a data analyst for the YouTube music service, told the meeting of Austin City Council last week, "It's been over a year since we first went on strike over our employer's return to office policy". Employees opposed that policy, he added, not because they didn't want to work from YouTube's office in Austin, but because the post-COVID policy change was "essentially a lay off against a large percentage of our team who didn't live in the Austin area".

"Again in September we went on strike over our employer's refusal to bargain with our union", he went on. "To this day they refuse to come to the negotiating table and Google still refuses to acknowledge us as their employees even after countless losses in court which say the contrary". That latter point relates to the fact that the YouTube Music team are technically contractors employed via a third party, the professional services company Cognizant.

Having thanked council members for sponsoring the resolution that calls on YouTube to bargain with the union, Benedict said that the council's support was "yet another victory and another step in pressuring our employers to come to the negotiating table and bargain in good faith".

Then, as he began to expand on that point, a colleague of Benedict's stepped forward to let him know that the entire team had been laid off.

In a subsequent statement, Benedict told reporters, “This is devastating. We have been fighting for years now to get Google, one of the most powerful and well-resourced companies in the world, to negotiate with us so that we could make a living in exchange for the work we do to make their products better. It is disgusting that Google has taken this path when confronted with its workers’ modest demands to be treated fairly on the job".

Cognizant says that the Austin-based YouTube Music team have been laid off because its contract with the Google company has expired. Employees, it adds, will receive seven weeks of paid time while they "explore other roles within the organisation". For its part, Google said, "contracts with our suppliers across the company routinely end on their natural expiry date, which was agreed to with Cognizant".

However, the Alphabet Workers Union, of which Benedict and his colleagues are members, insist that the contracting of teams via Cognizant is a tactic employed by Google to reduce its obligations to its employees.

"The layers of subcontracting are a mechanism by which Google distances itself from its responsibilities to its workers", it said last week. "However, the National Labor Relations Board has upheld a ruling that recognised Google and Cognizant as joint employers of these workers. The NLRB found that Google has control over workers and their working conditions and is thus obligated to directly negotiate with their union".

Whatever the technicalities and legalities, having team members find out they are being axed in the middle of explaining to Austin councillors why YouTube and Cognizant are bad employers is not a good look. We await to see if any legal action follows.

Raye wins record-breaking six BRIT Awards

Raye failed to take away eleven of this year’s BRIT Awards on Saturday evening. Sure, she was only eligible for one of those eleven awards, but it still means that nearly two thirds of all the prizes available went to other artists. It’s no wonder she was in tears by the time she took to the stage to accept what was only her sixth prize of the night.

Anyone from Polydor reading, I don’t know if that paragraph made you feel any better about what unfolded on Saturday. Eighteen months after being released from her record contract with the Universal Music label, the now independent artist broke the record for the most BRITs won by a female act in a single ceremony. She also equals the overall record already held jointly by David Bowie, Michael Jackson and Oasis.

The only prize for which she was nominated that she didn’t take home was Best Pop Act - one of five public voted genre categories. She did win Best R&B Act though, so she still had that section of the prize list sewn up.

As well as that, she walked away with Song Of The Year for ‘Escapism’, Best New Artist, Songwriter Of The Year, Artist Of The Year, and Album Of The Year for her debut LP ‘My 21st Century Blues’.

"You just don't understand what this means to me”, she said, accepting her last prize of the night - the Album Of The Year trophy - in tears.

Indeed, back in 2021, she posted a video on social media, exasperated that - after five years signed to Polydor - she had still not been allowed to release an album, despite being contracted to deliver four for the label.

"I've done everything [Polydor] asked me, I switched genres, I worked seven days a week", she said. "They either listen to me now or we part ways and they can save themselves this headache. Because I'm about to make it a headache”.

Within weeks she had been released from her deal and allowed to take her songs with her, and three months later she announced that she would be forging ahead as an independent artist, using Sony Music’s The Orchard for distribution. Before 2022 was out, she’d scored her first UK number one single with ‘Escapism’, one of the songs she had said six months earlier was "sat in folders collecting dust" because of her former label.

She released ‘My 21st Century Blues’ in February 2023, which peaked at number two in the UK albums chart and later scored a Mercury Prize nomination. Her BRITs triumph is not only a vindication but a pretty incredible conclusion to this phase of her story.

Anyway, that’s all nice, but it’s not really the big story of the night from this year’s BRITs bash. That accolade goes to Kylie Minogue. Not for her closing performance to mark winning the Global Icon Award though. Or even winning that award itself. No, we’re of course talking about the ‘shoey’ she partook in with presenter Roman Kemp.

A shoey - for the four people who don’t know at this stage - is drinking out of a shoe. It’s an Australian thing, apparently. And Kylie is Australian, so when asked if she’d do it by Kemp, she kind of had to. I mean, she didn’t. No one has to do a shoey. And no one should. But she did.

This has raised two big questions that are now burning through the internet: Did she know that Kemp was going to ask her to drink from a shoe? And was there actually anything in the shoe she apparently drank from?

It seems unlikely that Minogue wasn’t in on it, given that it mainly seems to have been an opportunity for a bit of product placement for her own wine brand.

And yeah, it also seems unlikely that she actually drank anything from that shoe. Or that the shoes she and Kemp at the very least held against their faces were the pair she’d been wearing all night.

Still, for those who think Kemp was out of line, this has become just another criticism of his presenting on the night. But I think everyone’s forgetting that when Green Day appeared on stage to present the Best Group award, he introduced them as “the American Busted”. That’s one for the ages and he should be asked back again next year for that alone.

Anyway, if you want to know who the winners were who weren’t Raye, here’s a nice list for you…

Rising Star: The Last Dinner Party

Best New Artist: Raye

Artist Of The Year: Raye

Group Of The Year: Jungle

Song Of The Year: Raye feat 0207 Shake - Escapism

Album Of The Year: Raye - My 21st Century Blues

International Artist Of The Year: SZA

International Group Of The Year: Boygenius

International Song Of The Year: Miley Cyrus - Flowers

R&B Act: Raye

Alternative/Rock Act: Bring Me The Horizon

Dance Act: Calvin Harris

Hip Hop/Grime/Rap Act: CASISDEAD

Pop Act: Dua Lipa

Songwriter Of The Year: Raye

Producer Of The Year: Chase & Status

Global Icon: Kylie Minogue

Setlist Podcast: UK music revenues are back to their CD peak (sort of)

On this week's show we discuss the news that UK music retail revenues are back to where they were at the peak of the CD era in 2001. So long as you imagine that no time has passed in between. Plus, the legal battle over Kanye West’s “shameless” interpolation of a Donna Summer track.

🎧 Click here to listen - or search for 'Setlist' wherever you normally listen

Stability files defence in important test case on AI and UK copyright law

Stability AI last week filed a defence in its UK copyright legal battle with Getty Images. Stability argues that it is not liable for copyright infringement within the UK because the training of its Stable Diffusion platform happens in the US. Meanwhile, any images generated by the platform for UK users which are similar to Getty-owned pictures are not direct copies and should be considered "pastiche", which would allow the AI company to rely on a copyright exception.

In a lawsuit filed with the London courts last May, Getty accuses Stability of making copies of its photos without permission when training Stable Diffusion. Although not a music case, it is an important legal battle testing the copyright obligations of generative AI companies under UK law. As a result, it is of interest to all copyright industries, including the music industry.

"Stable Diffusion was not trained in the UK and we expect to be fully vindicated at trial", a spokesperson for the AI company told Law360 last week, after the formal defence papers had been filed. In its legal filings, Stability says that the training of Stable Diffusion took place on an Amazon Web Services cloud computing cluster located in the US, a few thousand miles away from the jurisdiction of the London courts.

The location of the actual AI training is important. When sued in the US courts, AI companies argue that making copies of works as part of an AI training process constitutes fair use and therefore no permission is required. But there is no fair use defence under UK law, nor a specific data mining copyright exception that can be relied on. Hence Stability is so keen to stress that no training of Stable Diffusion happened within the UK.

Even if Stability wins that part of the dispute, Getty has other arguments. For example, it wants the AI firm to be held liable for secondary infringement by making Stable Diffusion - wherever it may have been trained - available in the UK. Getty notes that UK law states that "the copyright in a work is infringed by a person who imports into the UK an article which is, and which he knows or has reason to believe is, an infringing copy of the work".

Stable Diffusion is a copyright infringing article, Getty argues. Though Stability counters that when that rule talks about 'articles', it means tangible objects, and therefore the rule does not apply to a person or company making software available via a website to UK users.

Stability actually tried to have Getty's case struck out last year based on its arguments that all training took place in the US and the claim of secondary infringement was not valid. However, in December the judge overseeing the litigation said the case should go to trial so that more evidence could be gathered and presented to inform both those arguments. Hence the filing of a formal defence by Stability last week.

The other claim that is commonly made in copyright lawsuits against AI companies is that some works generated by an AI model are sufficiently similar to works in its training dataset that there is another claim for infringement on the output.

Like other AI companies defending copyright actions, Stability argues that that is based on a misunderstanding of how its technology works. The "synthetic images" generated by its model are "diffused from random noise", it argues, and are never direct copies of any training materials.

While it may be possible to get Stable Diffusion to generate images similar to existing Getty images, that requires very specific prompting from a user, it adds, which is only likely if that user - say Getty or its agents - is specifically seeking such similarity. Which is to say, if an image is "induced under highly artificial conditions".

Plus, in what is perhaps Stability's most interesting argument, it says if any image generated by its AI is similar to a Getty image, that should be considered a pastiche. Doing so would be useful, because, under UK law, using a work "for the purposes of caricature, parody or pastiche does not infringe copyright in the work".

The case continues.

Pathways Into Music launches new professional development programme for music educators

The Pathways Into Music Foundation - the not-for-profit set up by CMU to connect music education with the music industry - has announced details of a new professional development programme that will help music educators across the UK better support young people who want to pursue a career in music - whether as music-makers or in an industry role.

Supported by Arts Council England, the programme will consist of an in-person weekend and three webinars. It will put the focus on careers and trends in the music business, providing music educators with the information, knowledge and contacts they need to advise and support students who seek to pursue a career in music.

It is aimed at anyone involved in educating or supporting young people making music in the UK, including: music teachers in schools, instrument tutors, and FE and HE lecturers, plus people working for music education hubs and talent development organisations.

Participants will get an overview of all the different strands of music education and the music industry, and the different career routes, including as a frontline artist, portfolio musician, industry executive or music entrepreneur.

Plus, a team of industry experts will outline what young people need to know to get their careers started – including around music rights and fanbase building – and will offer guidance on how educators can best provide this knowledge and information, and what resources and initiatives to sign-post.

The in-person weekend takes place in Derby on Saturday 27 and Sunday 28 Apr, with webinars before and after. Participation is free thanks to the Arts Council England support, including free accommodation on the Saturday night.

There is more information and an application form here.