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Comment by hylaride

2 months ago

Apple Music’s margins are probably not that great. It does have to pay licensing fees, but everything else? Maybe…

I'd bet it's still well over 50% margins. At Apple's scale, royalties are pennies on each dollar you make.

  • Aren't the royalties usually revenue share deals with the record labels like Spotify has?

    So that makes it really hard to make a lot of profit - as the royalty costs grow linearly with your revenue.

    • Yeah, royalty payments average ~60-70% for services where we can cleanly see the breakdown, and much higher for certain artists that can command it. Assuming the overhead for Apple and Spotify is 10% (big assumption), the margins are 20%, which is small for most SaaS. However, I assume both mostly use it as a loss (well, less-profit) leader as part of wider bundles.