These days, however, everyone has unfettered access to music, which if anything makes investigations more difficult and intimidating. Ratliff’s fourth book, Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty (read an excerpt here), explores not the possibilities of what we hear, but of how we hear it — and how that can open doors to new musical experiences.

New York Times critic Ben Ratliff

Bandwidth: You know, Every Song Ever strikes me as a sort of 21st century update of Aaron Copland’s What To Listen For in Music.

Ben Ratliff: Well, you hit it right on the head. I can’t even remember whether I cited that book explicitly, but yes. That was part of the genesis — just thinking about that book and what it was trying to do in its time, and other books like it. There was a whole musical appreciation movement in the first half of the 20th century, of which that was a great example. The idea is, “So you want to enjoy music more. You want to be a reasonably educated listener. What do you need to know? What are the ways in?”

And I thought, boy, if a book like that were to be written now, first of all there would be no assumption that classical music above all was the most important. It would just be one of many different kinds. And then it would have to take into account the fact that we have access to everything. Canons are looking more and more endangered, because of access. Access changes the whole equation. Access is power, it’s knowledge; we’re less powerful in a lot of ways, but we’re more powerful in terms of cultural choice.

So yeah, it’s basically Aaron Copland plus Spotify. [What To Listen For in Music] in an era when you could reach into your phone and find what seems, at least, like every song in the world.

“I think the streaming services would rather you be passive, rather you give them the reins and let them decide what you like, and who you are, and what kind of listener you are.”

Who is your ideal reader? Somebody who just wants help sorting out all of the possibilities that are out there?

Well, I wanted to just suggest the spirit of listening that would go against the idea of genre — that’s part of the goal. And I wanted to write — this is a set of 20 essays exploring different kinds of listening experiences and making connections between seemingly far apart examples of music. And saying, “Look, you’ve been taught otherwise, but late Shostakovich does have something in common with DJ Screw.” That’s what this book is.

But I think underlying it is a sense of, maybe it’s a good idea to start thinking about the possibilities of listening now, while the streaming services are still figuring out ways to get a hold of us. Streaming services seem to be the future of listening; that’s the way it is, and there isn’t anything that someone like me can do to change that. And if I were to change it, I’m not sure what I’d want to change it to. It’s all about efficiency. Listening in an efficient way is authentic — pulling out your phone and listening to a song through a crappy speaker hole is an authentic way to listen in 2016.

But I’m a little worried about the fact that the streaming services might have a lot of say in what new music you might be encountering from here on in. So what I’m doing is, I’m not suggesting a canon — these are the works you ought to know — I’m just suggesting a spirit of listening such that any old listener might feel that they can encounter something new, that they don’t recognize and comes from a tradition they’ve never heard before, and think, “Maybe this isn’t so alien. Maybe this is about me, too. Maybe this is something I can claim, because some aspect of it reminds me of something that I do know.”

I wonder, since you talk about streaming services, if you have a feeling that your book goes against the grain of services like Pandora or Apple Radio — the curated experience, which suggests more of a narrowcasting trend. Do you think your book serves as an antidote to that?

Theoretically, yes. Practically, I have no idea. My understanding, from what I have seen of algorithmic listening — which could mean Pandora feeding you an endless chain of songs somehow related to your favorite artist or Spotify giving you a very sophisticated playlist every week tailored to things you have looked up and to a profile it has built of you — is that in all of these cases, you are being reduced. And you are being reduced by a force that is probably not even human.

As clever as these algorithms can be, I think that listening is really a creative activity, and it’s not just passive. Listening makes you grow; it informs your emotional intelligence, it makes you become a bigger person. Your being able to luck into something you’ve never heard before and figure out what you’re going to do with it, figure out, “What is the way into this piece of music?” in a creative way, I think is crucial. I think the streaming services would rather you be passive, rather you give them the reins and let them decide what you like, and who you are, and what kind of listener you are.

I know that’s efficient; I think their main priority is how quickly they can bring satisfaction to you. From a business standpoint, that makes a lot of sense. But I also think, “Wait a minute. We’re talking about listening here, listening to music. It’s so important. It helps shape our identities.” And I’m concerned about leaving that up to robots.

“A lot of us live within half an hour of a place where you hear a completely different kind of music on the street, and a lot of us block it out. ‘That’s alien to me, I don’t know anything about it; I’m not gonna take it in.'”

Do you have kids?

Yeah.

Do you notice different ways that they find new music, or find new ways to appreciate the music they already know?

I would say that a lot of what they’ve learned about music has come through YouTube, probably more than any other single source. And I think like anybody else, they follow links — maybe less so now, because they’re getting into the higher teenage years — but when they started doing a lot of listening on their own, they followed a trail that YouTube, especially, laid for them.

Now, if you listen to a song on YouTube, you don’t even have to press a button: Another one is going to start in 10 seconds, and it’ll be related in some way to the one you just saw. So there’s very little that you have to do, and we know where to look to encounter new things — we look on the right side of our YouTube screen.

The big question that I’ve been encountering is, Fine. Very well. You’re saying that it’s good to go against reductive ideas about genre and about listener profiles, and to listen across genre and retrain yourself to take in different kinds of music. That’s all very well, but how do you find the stuff? If you decide you like loudness as a listening experience, where do you go? You know what you know; how do you get outside of that? If you’re rooted in metal, how do you get outside of that and find loud music that comes from a completely other tradition than metal?

And really, that’s where listeners are more on their own. And that’s where I’m encouraging them to basically do anything other than be passive around algorithms. To talk to people, ask people questions. To read. To keep their ears open when they’re entering a neighborhood where music other than what they’re familiar with is played. A lot of us live within half an hour of a place where you hear a completely different kind of music on the street, and a lot of us block it out. “That’s alien to me, I don’t know anything about it; I’m not gonna take it in.”

And you know, music is all around us, more and more, with TV and radio and online and movies. And I think there’s a greater and greater possibility of the dumb luck of encountering something we’ve never encountered before, and asking, “What does this have to do with me?”

“I think a lot of music criticism today is done through the eyes. It’s done with reference to a video, or things the artist has been doing on social media recently… there’s less consideration of the music as sound.”

I think that ties into your approach to this book, in that you don’t spend a lot of time on musical or cultural history, or authorial intent — all the tropes we expect an informed music critic to hit.

Especially these days, and especially dealing with popular music. Yeah, that’s absolutely right. That’s partly the conceit of the book, but it’s also partly what I like to do, and what I have found useful.

I feel like I’ve been really lucky to have this job for 20 years, where I can write about anything that isn’t labeled classical music, because there’s a whole bunch of other critics doing that job. So that’s a really, really wide spectrum, and it feels good to be able to review completely different kinds of music on different nights of the week. But I need a way into all of it. And for me that’s with sound. Because I’m dealing with a wide variety of things, I deal with sound first. What is the information in this sound? What is this song attempting to do through music? What is the experience of listening to it all about?

So that’s where I start, and all of the other considerations come later for me. What’s the political angle of this song, what’s the messaging, what’s the coding, what kind of statement is being made here in relation to this artist’s last album, or whatever.

So to that degree, I’m sort of writing an autobiography of how I have come to listen. I guess I am slightly making an argument for hearing music as music — with whatever tools you have. You don’t have to be a composer, you don’t have to have harmonic theory or any of that stuff. You just need ears, and need to use them.

I think a lot of music criticism today is done through the eyes. It’s done with reference to a video, or things the artist has been doing on social media recently. And there’s not so much  there’s less consideration of the music as sound. I’m not convinced that this is a bad thing, but I’m just trying to write about music in a way that feels real to me.

Ben Ratliff discusses his book Feb. 23 at Politics & Prose. 7 p.m.

If the songwriters prevail it could cost Spotify tens of millions of dollars in unpaid royalties. And according to experts in the music industry, this may be only the beginning, because other streaming services reportedly commit the same violations.

The named plaintiff in the lawsuit, filed on Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, is David Lowery, an outspoken musicians’ rights advocate and frontman of rock bands Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker. He says his songs have been streamed hundreds of thousands of times without his permission.

Lowery, who also teaches music business at the University of Georgia, alleges that Spotify streams his songs without getting licenses from him to do it or paying him accordingly.

In a statement, Spotify says it has tried to find rights holders, but “the data necessary to confirm the appropriate rights holders is often missing, wrong or incomplete.” Spotify says it has set aside a fund to pay songwriters when they are identified. Earlier this month, it announced that it would invest in “a comprehensive publishing administration system” to better track royalty information.

“The point is not that they didn’t set aside royalties; the point is that they never got the licenses in the first place,” Lowery tells NPR. “There appears to be no licenses on my songs and a great number of songwriters’ songs. Setting aside the royalty, what is that royalty based on? There’s no license.”

Lowery’s lawyer, Sanford Michelman, says Spotify may owe tens of millions of dollars not just in unpaid royalties but also for copyright infringement, which can run as high as $150,000 per violation.

Music streaming services have been a growing and popular business, but they have faced opposition from artists including Prince, Thom Yorke, Beyonce, Taylor Swift and most recently Adele.

A major sticking point has been how these services pay the musicians for distributing their music. One study of the music business by the Berklee College of Music’s Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship suggested earlier this year that anywhere from 20 percent to 50 percent of music payments don’t make it to their rightful owners.

And as NPR’s Joel Rose has reported, the songwriters often get a far smaller share of those payments:

“The way those royalties are split is far from equal, in part because there are two different types of copyright holders for every song a streaming service plays. One is the owner of the sound recording — that’s usually the artist or the record label. The other is the person (or persons) who wrote the song, or someone else to whom rights have been granted, like a music publisher.”

(Rose explained in detail the legal framework that guides the music industry in a story earlier this year.)

Here’s a bit of background on Lowery’s case from The Wrap:

“The class-action suit identifies members of the class to be anyone who owns reproduction and distribution rights of copyrighted songs that have been played by Spotify.

“Lowery has long been an advocate for artists’ interests as the music business shifts its business models. In a 2013 blog post, he recounted how online radio service Pandora paid him just $16.89 in songwriter royalties for more than 1 million spins of Cracker’s hit song ‘Low.’ ”

Lowery’s lawsuit only names Spotify and doesn’t include the major song publishers (Sony, for example, has an agreement with Spotify). But Jeff Price, CEO of publishing rights tracking company Audiam, says he has seen a similar problem at all the services, including Apple, Google and Tidal.

“This suit brings to the foreground an endemic problem that has existed since the launch of the interactive streaming music services,” Price says.

You can read the full court filing from Lowery below.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Every year, the nonprofit Future of Music Coalition hosts a summit that tackles the trickiest issues facing musicians today, and it’s not afraid to get into the weeds.

At this year’s conference, held in October at Georgetown University in D.C., musicians, educators, reps and DJs took on the big subjects, including music education and the modern role of radio. But many panels went deeper, examining the nuts-and-bolts of the digital music economy — and exposing new fault lines in the process.

Here are the three biggest ideas I heard at this year’s Future of Music Policy Summit.

Digital music has a transparency problem

The decline of album sales has been a long time in the making. But as the physical-music market shrinks, its replacement — digital streaming — has ushered in a new set of problems. If there was one point central to most discussions at the Future of Music Policy Summit, it was how streaming services have institutionalized the expectation that music should be widely available for free.

“The future of music is being built and musicians are being left out of it,” said musician Tift Merritt. “That’s like building a house with bricks you didn’t pay for.”

The big culprits, of course, are digital services like Spotify and Apple Music, which many panelists decried as opaque.

Songwriter Shelly Peiken — who has written chart-topping hits including Christina Aguilera’s “What a Girl Wants” — sat on a panel of professional songwriters. “When streaming became the new business model,” Peiken said, “the laws that dictated how songwriters get paid didn’t take into account a digital universe.”

But those criticizing the lack of transparency and fairness in how artists are paid also found a classic villain in major record labels.

Told that Spotify does in fact pay rights holders — i.e. record labels — former Pink Floyd manager Peter Jenner earned applause for his response: “But the rights holders are extremely dishonest,” he quipped.

Songwriters Guild of America President Rick Carnes added, “We don’t even have enough information to blame anybody. The record labels own part of Spotify. If they don’t pay the record labels the money, maybe it’s because they have a deal with the record labels.”

The only way to get transparent information about streaming revenue for his own songs, Carnes said, “is under discovery in a court case or if a North Korean hacker tells me.”

Musicians need to be more than artists

So what happens when musicians, managers, record labels and digital distributors all sit down and discuss potential solutions to these problems?

Liv Buli of Pandora’s Next Big Sound summarized the industry’s perspective succinctly: “You can complain about it, but when we’re seeing people succeed is when they adapt to it.”

Digital-platform representatives seemed to define adaptation as executing effective social-media campaigns, aggregating and analyzing data and efficiently marketing merchandise and ticket sales to a core fan base. But who should have to do that work? One discussion offered a clear answer: artists should.

“Making Moments Matter: Musicians and Time Management” focused on how musicians can balance their artistic work with the increasing need to self-manage, self-promote and self-release.

At the policy summit, the clear message was that artists must be playing a fairly sophisticated numbers game to be taken seriously in the music business.

Musicians had mixed responses to the idea that they should be taking on a more active role in self-promotion. I asked Shelby Peiken how wearing more hats affects musicians and songwriters.

“If a musician wakes up every day and focuses on his or her craft, they’re going to get better and better at it,” Peiken said. “If they also have to spend time and energy honing social-media skills, booking dates [and] liaising with band members, it’s possible their art will not get the attention it needs and their music will suffer.”

That thought seemed to be at the heart of a key question from bassist Melvin Gibbs.

“My job is to move crowds,” Gibbs said, addressing a wonky panel of data specialists. “It took me as long to learn how to move crowds as it took for you to learn how to do what you do [with analytics]. How am I expected to do both?”

That prompted a response from CD Baby’s Tracy Maddux that may have sounded hollow to artists in the audience. “It’s incumbent on an artist not to be a business person,” he said, “but to surround themselves with business people that they trust.”

Maddux’s comment didn’t jibe with what other industry spokespeople had said throughout the summit. After two days of music reps touting the importance of social-media strategies, the clear message was that artists must already be playing a fairly sophisticated numbers game to even be taken seriously in the music business.

Musicians are laborers

Another eyebrow-raising moment came when former Interscope data analyst Kiran Gandhi offered what she admitted was forced optimism: “What a joy to be in a broken music industry,” Gandhi said. “More so than ever, artists are relevant in the industry.”

While “joy” may not have been the word of choice for many musicians at the summit, Gandhi did point to another emerging consensus: that musicians, whether by choice or necessity, are finally starting to build a movement to advocate for themselves.

Building stronger unions for musicians was among the more rousing strategies suggested during the conference.

The socialist-leaning Jenner chastised musicians for not unionizing. “The problem is you Americans care far too much about competition and not enough about cooperation and not enough about unions,” he said.

“We can think ‘artist’ with a capital A all we want,” echoed Andy Schwartz, a representative from the American Federation of Musicians, “but in the minds of the people who pay us, we are labor.”

Another model that came up was the Fair Trade Music movement, which has put down roots in D.C. as well as places like Seattle.

“Can we apply the fair-trade food model to drive for transparency and change in the music industry?” asked Panos Panay of the Berklee Institute during a keynote talk.

On the tail of the Music Cities Convention that took place at Georgetown University one day beforehand, the idea that local city governments could be doing more to boost their local music communities became a point of consensus.

“We have been stuck, in the music industry, in a very negative dialogue,” said Shain Shapiro, the managing director of Sound Diplomacy. But he called the Music Cities movement unifying.

Transforming the role governments play in the arts, Shapiro said, is “agnostic to the debate over some of the more negative divisive arguments.”

Read David Combs’ three-part series on the economy of DIY music.

Top photo by Flickr user Jason McELweenie used under a Creative Commons license.

A new report released today by the Berklee College of Music’s Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship details what it repeatedly calls a “lack of transparency” in the music business. Titled “Transparency and Money Flows,” the 28-page report also gives recommendations that highlight the labyrinthine complexity of the current system.

The output of a year-long study, the report cites estimates “that anywhere from 20-50 percent of music payments don’t make it to their rightful owners.” Proposed fixes include better behind-the-scenes technologies, a “Creator’s Bill of Rights,” a “Fair Music” seal and education campaigns.

Those approximated percentages for music payouts lost in limbo are “based on multiple conversations with many different folks involved in payments,” acknowledges Allen Bargfrede, an associate professor at Berklee who spearheaded the report. “I personally believe the number is closer to 20%, especially in Europe and North America, but probably can be as high as 50% when you start to look at streaming payments in other languages that have different character sets.”

The reasons so much revenue might fail to trickle down are as baroquely varied as the services and royalty types that generate music income in the first place. Musicians (or anyone to whom they sell their rights) can earn fractions of pennies or thousands of dollars from streaming services, from licenses for films, TV or commercials and from whatever lawyers deem “public performances” of their works, all without anyone ever buying a CD or mp3. A growing layer of middlemen that collect the money and theoretically pass it on to the rights holders presents another opportunity for some of that revenue to lose its way.

One focus of the report is the so-called “black box,” a phrase that refers to where money ends up when, for instance, royalty revenue from a stream can’t be linked back to a songwriter.

Or take “breakage,” the difference between the advance a streaming service pays to a label and the royalties. If each streaming service were to pay each of the three major labels the $42.5 million advance for which Sony Music was eligible under a leaked Spotify contract published by The Verge this past spring, the potential pool of breakage revenues to labels would total hundreds of million dollars, the report says. Since the leak, the major labels have all said they share advance payments with artists.

Another source of funds for the black box stems from differences in international copyright law, which results in license fees being collected abroad for what’s known as the “performance” of U.S. sound recordings. According to the report, this revenue usually ends up with foreign sources, which pass the money along to local artists.

“The biggest message out of the report is just the lack of technology adoption for the back end of the music industry,” Berklee’s Bargfrede says. “Streaming is now becoming the dominant method of music consumption. We need to figure out how to work with the streaming services in a way that makes sense to creators.”

More specifically, the report calls for an industry-standard format for up-to-date information about the various types of music revenues, so artists could in effect monitor their royalties online the way consumers track their bank accounts. The authors also propose creating “a decentralized, feasible” database of global copyright ownership details.

The “Creator’s Bill of Rights” would lay out a set of foundational principles for artists, from the right to be fairly compensated to the right to know which parties are taking a cut out of their payments streams. The “Fair Music” certification would allow digital services and labels to show they meet certain standards, similar to fair-trade coffee or organic vegetables.

Beyond that, the Berklee researchers suggest lobbying Congress to enact a sweeping overhaul of the music copyright system proposed earlier this year by the U.S. Copyright Office. Finally, the report urges education programs to inform musicians about these issues affecting their revenue streams.

(Editor’s Note: NPR’s Policy and Representation division is a member of the MIC Coalition, a consortium made up of organizations including Google, Pandora and the National Association of Broadcasters concerned about the potential for rising royalty rates. The Policy and Representation division is separate from NPR’s newsroom. NPR journalists and music curators have no role or involvement in the coalition. UPDATE at 12:40 p.m. ET, July 15: NPR’s Policy and Representation division confirmed today that it has left the MIC Coalition. It has not yet given give a reason. As Billboard reports, “Amazon dropped out of the coalition early last month because it believed the group was focusing too much on music rates and not enough on transparency.”)

The recommendations arrive as the issue of transparency in the music industry has been increasingly drawing more attention. A recent Financial Times op-ed suggested Swift should use her industry leverage to push for “a baseline set of contractual terms for digital, backed by more transparency about who is paying what to whom.” Bringing further scrutiny to the issue was a June lawsuit by a group of American Idol winners that includes Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood, claiming Sony’s deal with Spotify cheats artists, given the label’s ownership stake in the streaming service.

Also significantly, Kobalt Music Group — a company that tracks and collects royalties — was the subject of a glowing May cover story in Wired UK featuring Skrillex. Kobalt is an underwriter of Berklee’s Rethink Music program, of which this report is a part. Bargfrede says the work remains objective.

Some industry observers agree that transparency is a problem for the music industry, though not all fully support the report’s proposed solutions.

Transparency is “the next big fight,” says Casey Rae, CEO of the artists’ advocacy nonprofit Future of Music Coalition, in an email.

“The current environment has too many ‘black boxes,'” he explains. “It’s simply too easy for big companies to sit on money because they can’t find out who to pay, or don’t care to know. It’s time to demand more accountability and transparency, and artists can play a crucial role in that push.”

Mark Mulligan, co-founder of digital-music market research firm MiDiA Research, says that while transparency is “certainly important,” increasing it isn’t going to fundamentally change the state of the industry.

“That’s essentially putting on a different coat of paint,” he tells NPR. “It’s still the same engine.”

To Mulligan, the biggest shift in the industry remains the transition from an “ownership model” to a “rental model,” and the differing payout methods that entails.

Jeff Price, founder of Tunecore and CEO of Audiam, a company that helps track down royalties from digital services, says between 15 percent and 30 percent of tracks on streaming services globally go unmatched with a songwriter. He says Audiam has collected more than $600,000 in the past 12 months from streaming services in so-called mechanical royalties for its client list, which includes the publishing catalogues of Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Jason Mraz. More than 40% of that revenue, which is only from U.S. streams, predates the launch of his current business.

“For every single client we represent we have discovered they are just not getting paid for most recordings of their songs,” Price says.

Price lays much of the blame at the feet at what’s known as a “compulsory license.” That’s the system allowing any musician to copy another’s song without asking permission, so long as she pays a federally mandated fee. It’s a system that dates to a 1908 Supreme Court decision that also gave rise to the idea of “mechanical” royalties, which apply to all mechanical reproductions of songs; the machines in question, back then, were player pianos.

Price also expresses skepticism about the report’s proposal of a global rights database.

“Do you think Sony or Warner or even the kid down the street would want the condition of being paid to be some third-party database?” he asks. “Abso-f******-lutely not. I would never want that. I would want to go directly to the place that owes me money and tell the my name.”

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) declined to comment on the recommendations without seeing the full report. “We support efforts to ensure all music creators are paid fairly and efficiently for their work, and we look forward to reading the report,” says RIAA spokesperson Cara Duckworth in an email response.

The American Association of Independent Music (A2IM), which represents independent labels, welcomes the discussion.

“A2IM is extremely supportive of all industry efforts that would result in greater accuracy in reporting on intellectual property usage and the resulting revenue streams for creators,” says Molly Neuman, acting president of A2IM, in an emailed statement. “The independent label community currently represents 35.1% of market share and we believe that with more accurate reporting, that share would be significantly larger.

“We look forward to working with our industry colleagues on efforts to adopt practices to ensure all rights holders are paid precisely what they are due.”

Ben Swank, a co-founder of indie label Third Man Records along with Jack White, also cautiously cheers the growing dialogue. (White is a prominent Tidal backer.)

“Transparency is paramount right now,” Swank tells NPR. “Artists want to be compensated fairly for their work and their art, but I think the communication is really important to artists, and making sure that they get their statements every six months. They like to work with us because they know someone’s actually going to respond to their emails.”

That said, while Swank doesn’t oppose the idea of some industry-wide standards around payouts, he says the accounting on digital streams might take more time than the “Creator’s Bill of Rights” would allow. And he’s similarly ambivalent about the idea of a “Fair Music” seal.

“I like that, but honestly think that labels’ reputations should be able to bear them out without having that official certification,” he says. “It feels weird to have to have some kind of certified thing to prove that you’re not f****** over your artists.”

As for streaming services, Spotify tells NPR it’s focused on transparency, too.

“We’re big believers in transparency and think it’s key to building a new music economy that pays artists and songwriters fairly,” says Jonathan Prince, global head of public policy and communications at Spotify, in an emailed statement. “We’re committed to working with everyone in the business to increase transparency because it will only work if everyone in the value chain — from creators to rights holders to platforms and distributors — does it together.”

Artists, fans, labels, streaming services and others with a stake in the music industry’s future will have more chances to weigh in on the report’s proposals. Berklee’s Rethink Music initiative has scheduled a public event on the subject in Boston on October 2. “We welcome anyone to please participate,” Bargfrede says. The floor for the music industry’s transparency debate is open.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

The letter, from a law firm representing Universal, was addressed to the antitrust bureau of the attorney general’s office. It stated that Universal currently has no deals with Apple or companies such as Sony Music that would “impede the availability of free or ad-supported music streaming services, or … limit, restrict, or prevent UMG from licensing its recorded music repertoire to any music streaming service.”

The letter did not specifically say Apple was among the targets of the investigation. But Universal’s attorneys did say the company was not colluding with Apple or its two major rival labels, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group.

A spokesperson for New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman had this response:

“This letter is part of an ongoing investigation of the music streaming business, an industry in which competition has recently led to new and different ways for consumers to listen to music. To preserve these benefits, it’s important to ensure that the market continues to develop free from collusion and other anti-competitive practices.”

The investigation centers on whether Apple may have urged the labels to drop support for free, ad-supported streaming services such as Spotify and Google’s YouTube. Such a move could be seen as anti-competitive.

Albert Foer, the founder of the American Antitrust Institute, says the current investigation may have been sparked in part by Apple’s history. The company was found guilty last year of conspiring with book publishers to raise the price of e-books when it launched its online book store. Among those who brought the charges were 33 state attorneys general, including Schneiderman.

There are some parallels between the music industry and the publishing business. At the time Apple entered into the e-book market, publishers were upset by the prices Amazon was forcing on them. Apple had a business model that let publishers set the prices higher. In the case of music, the labels have been unhappy with the money paid out by free, ad-supported services. Most famously, Taylor Swift withheld her latest music from Spotify over the issue.

“The suspicion would be of the corporate culture and how they operate,” Foer says about why the attorney general would investigate Apple Music. “It’s just that investigators will have suspicions in some cases because of what happened in the past.” But he says the investigation could also have been triggered by complaints from someone inside the music industry.

Chris Castle, a music industry attorney, finds it hard to believe that Apple would follow the same road that made it the target of an investigation that resulted in a $450 million settlement, along with supervision by an antitrust monitor. “The idea that these guys would blindly walk into this is crazy,” says Castle. “It just doesn’t seem plausible.”

In fact, Connecticut State Attorney General George Jepsen, who is also focused on music streaming, told Reuters that his office was satisfied that Universal did not have anti-competitive agreements to withhold music titles from free services. However, Jepsen did not say he’d stopped investigating Apple. And European Union officials are also investigating Apple Music.

But Castle says he will be surprised if this goes anywhere. Apple, he notes, has a lot of competition in the streaming music space: Spotify, YouTube, GooglePlay, Amazon. “There are inquiries all the time” he says. “They ask a few questions. You send a response and that’s it.”

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

The announcement, made at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference, comes more than a year after Apple acquired Beats Music, the streaming service founded by Jimmy Iovine, Dr. Dre and Trent Reznor. Iovine and Reznor both appeared in the presentation to explain and introduce elements of the service, which will include a live, “24/7 global radio” station and a social media-like feature called “Connect” where musicians can directly upload content like lyrics, videos and photos.

Apple Music will be available on June 30. The service, which will have no free option, will cost $9.99 a month for a single subscription or $14.99 a month for a “family” subscription that allows up to six people to share an account. In an indication of the company’s hopes for its reach, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that the service would be available on Android phones in the fall. Until now, iTunes has only been available on Apple devices.

From the stage, Iovine, a longtime music executive employed by Apple since the acquisition of Beats, recalled the moment he first saw the iTunes store. It was a “simple, elegant way to buy music online” in an era when the recording industry had been decimated by file sharing, he said. But Apple Music is entering a playing field already crowded by other streaming services such as Spotify, Rdio, Pandora and Tidal.

As NPR’s Laura Sydell, who was in the audience at the event, tweeted, Iovine characterized the current streaming ecosystem as confusing and overwhelming, and he positioned Apple Music as “a complete thought around music,” a slightly awkward catchphrase later echoed in a video presentation by musician Trent Reznor. (That phrase might have been an oblique reference to the Beats Music feature The Sentence, in which users could create a playlist by describing their listening scenario. Get it? The Sentence … a “complete thought.” Oh well.)

Announced after nearly two hours of presentations on how Apple’s various operating systems will be updated in the coming year (promised developments: a new news app, open source programming language, Siri will be better, Maps will be better, Apple Pay continues to expand to more retailers), the introduction of the music service featured the participation of many well-known musicians including The Alabama Shakes, Pharrell Williams and The Weeknd, who performed a radio-ready new song.

Apple Music’s global 24/7 radio station will be staffed by notable DJs hired from terrestrial and Web radio stations: former BBC host Zane Lowe, Ebro Darden of New York’s Hot 97 and Julie Adenuga of Rinse FM.

Also part of the service, but relegated to a single mention at the end of the presentation, was the iTunes store itself, which Cook called “the best place to buy music.” If you’re still into that kind of thing.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Today, the original iPod, which was discontinued after just 13 years, looks as quaint as Sony’s Walkman cassette player, which survived more than 30. Last year, according to a report by Nielsen SoundScan, sales of digital songs dropped by more than 12 percent. Digital album sales were down almost 10 percent. They will not rebound in 2015.

Instead, more music fans are turning to free, ad-supported and paid-subscription services that offer instant access to libraries that would make the wildest dreams of the iPod user seem tame. The era of streaming music is upon us, and if you need writing on the wall, turn to the relentless coverage of Apple’s acquisition of Beats Music, a subscription service that is scheduled to be rolled into the iTunes platform sometime this year, possibly as soon as next week.

The timing can’t be an accident. Apple stands to gain plenty by luring its hundreds of millions of users to a subscription-based streaming service, but it stands to lose, as well: The transition will surely speed the decline of the single-song download, and iTunes, the world’s largest music store, will feel that pain acutely. Apple’s entry into the market isn’t the signal that the world is ready for streaming music; it’s proof that the transition has already begun.

So over the next week, rather than waiting to see when iTunes will launch its attack on established services like Spotify, we’re going to examine the world of streaming music that is upon us in a series called Streaming At The Tipping Point.

As these services have taken hold — Nielsen says that in 2014, on-demand streaming rose 54 percent — the news media has primarily covered them in two ways: as generators (but not always fair distributors) of cash and as technological novelties.

The question of money — of royalties — is a crucial one to the survival of the recording industry. But streaming music has unlocked other new questions for the musician and fan alike: of ownership, of taste and of morality. Do we listen differently when we have unlimited options? Does the rise of the streaming service eliminate the very need for a library of one’s own, or does it just change how we acquire and interact with that library? Do your musical preferences belong to you? What role do listeners play in ensuring the life of music and the livelihood of musicians?

For a large part of the recording industry, the move to embrace streaming actually solves a long-time paradox: one of ownership. Over digital music’s 30-year evolution, from the public introduction of the compact disc in 1981 to the international expansion of Spotify in the last half-decade, the question of whether listeners owned the music they purchased got murkier.

In an earlier era, there was no such question — buying a vinyl record meant you could listen to the music until you wore it out, filed it away forever or grew a new set of ears and snapped the old disc in half.

Call the CD — and the digital files it so precariously contained, the sources of the fundamental rift between listeners and labels — the digital infection. Once you could strip a song from its physical home and make a copy (or many copies), that control seemed to imply ownership. The recording industry’s fight against that principle took on the form of invasive digital rights management software, advertising campaigns, threats and lawsuits. You weren’t buying the music itself when you purchased an album or a song, it said, just the right to listen to it. But the MP3, the digital format gone airborne, turned this germ into a pandemic. The industry could argue all it wanted that listeners didn’t have the right to make copies and share them with strangers, but every new piece of technology made the counter-argument.

Streaming, at least the label-sanctioned version, puts the genie back in the bottle. Every time you click play on a streaming service, from Pandora to YouTube to Spotify, you’re licensing the right to listen to the song in that particular moment, whether you pay a subscription or sit through an ad. Ownership is never even an option. You listen, you license. If you want to listen again, you license again. In this way, streaming music suggests the passing of two eras: the digital download, but also the concept that fans might possess music itself.

No format lives forever. The LP, the cassette, the CD, the MP3 — each one dominated the market for about 15 years before ceding to the next technological advance. Will this latest revision define a new relationship between fans and cloud-bound digital files? The truth is, listeners bend each format to the utility they desire, and adapt to its particular attributes. The question we’ll ask over the next week is this: How will streaming change us?

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.