Reports are suggesting that Apple has acquired the support and signature of Warner Music as its strives to ready its 'iRadio' music streaming service for a suggested WWDC launch next Monday.
Over the weekend both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal reported that Apple had completed the deal for Warner's recorded music and music publishing rights.
The WSJ in particular claims that Apple will pay Warner an unprecedented 10 percent of advertising revenue, which is more than twice the amount paid by internet radio service Pandora.
With Sony Music Entertainment and Sony/ATV yet to agree to terms with Apple, and Universal only said to be half on board (with recorded music rights but not publishing rights), this would leave Apple literally half way to securing the full support of the three majors it would need to launch its own music streaming service.
The sticking points in all of these deals seems to be the level of royalty rates, as well as a minimum payment agreement and the precise point at which Apple will start paying out from its ad revenue. Apple's service will, it's claimed, tie in with its iAd service.
Apple's so-called iRadio service is rumoured to be tightly integrated into iTunes and closely linked to existing paid content. This new approach to music streaming apparently has record label support, but has also required a whole new set of terms and parameters to be drawn up.
With WWDC set to commence on June 10, time is running out for these deals to be struck. The full support of one of the majors could go a long way to pushing the other two deals through to completion.
Now read about Google's music streaming offering and how it threatens Apple.
