Apple Music Boosts Royalties For Artists Releasing Songs In Spatial Audio

Spatial Audio is one of the best features exclusive to Apple Music – and now the streaming giant will compensate artists who release songs in the format, boosting royalties by up to 10 percent.

For those unaware, Spatial Audio is a proprietary 3D audio format developed by Apple to take advantage of high-quality headphones, giving listeners multi-directional sound as though they were hearing it in a cinema. As What Hi-Fi put better than we ever could, Spatial Audio “takes 5.1, 7.1 and Dolby Atmos signals and applies directional audio filters, adjusting the frequencies that each ear hears so that sounds can be placed virtually anywhere in 3D space. Sounds will appear to be coming from in front of you, from the sides, the rear and even above.”

In an internal memo sent to label partners (and first reported on by Music Business Worldwide), Apple confirmed on Monday (January 22) that songs released in Spatial Audio will receive higher payouts than those that aren’t, by a figure of up to 10 percent. Starting with the month-end payouts for January, Apple wrote, “pro-rata shares for Spatial Available plays will be calculated using a factor of 1.1 while Non-Spatial Available plays will continue to use a factor of 1”.

According to the memo, the boost hopes to encourage more artists to put in the work for Spatial Audio releases – the company says their new payout model is “not only meant to reward higher quality content, but also to ensure that artists are being compensated for the time and investment they put into mixing in Spatial”.

It comes at a pivotal time for Apple Music, with the platform seeing “wide adoption of [Spatial Audio releases being made available by] the biggest hitmakers worldwide” – throughout 2023, for example, four fifths of the songs that made it to Apple Music’s Global Daily Top 100 were available to listen in Spatial Audio.

And as 9to5Mac pointed out, Apple Music listeners don’t even need to stream songs in Spatial Audio for artists to take advantage of this new royalty enhancement – the metric, they say, “is calculated based on the proportion of Spatial Available to Non-Spatial Available plays.”

Spatial Audio comes with native support for tracks mixed in Dolby Atmos, and was first offered to all Apple Music subscribers, at no additional cost, in June 2021. Since then, adoption with its user base has more than tripled, and the amount of songs supporting the format has surged by almost 5,000 percent (with the library growing by more than double over the past 12 months).

But artists can’t cheat the system by faking a Spatial Audio mix. As Apple said in its memo to label partners, the company has “a zero-tolerance policy against deceptive or manipulative content” which applies to Spatial Available tracks, utilising a “quality control process that includes flagging content not delivered in accordance with Apple Music’s Spatial Audio specifications and standards of quality”.

Head here to read more about Spatial Audio on Apple Music.