The streaming music wars continues to get uglier. We reported last week that Universal Music have banned signing off on artist streaming exclusives – releasing an album on one streaming service exclusively – after Frank Ocean pulled a fast one and released his album Blonde independently through Apple Music.
Apparently, Spotify has been retaliating against artists who choose to release their tunes exclusively through rivals by making their other releases much harder to find on the service. People familiar with the strategy reckon this has been going on for a while, suggesting that these artists are buried in the Spotify search rankings.
You might notice that when it comes to exclusives, it seems like Tidal and Apple Music cop the majority, and you’d be right. Tidal gets exclusives because Jay-Z happens to have a bunch of mates who so happen to be some of the biggest artists on the planet. Apple gets exclusives because there’s essentially no limit to how much money they can pay for an exclusive. They could probably pay for exclusive streaming rights for every album released in 2016 if they felt so inclined.
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Spotify deny these search shenanigans, and has said firmly that they do not alter rankings. They’ve also arced up at Apple in the past, claiming that those bloody crooks in Cupertino are deliberately stalling Spotify iOS app updates (Apple has denied doing this, for the record).
Spotify has sought exclusive streaming deals in the past, but their offering isn’t particularly attractive to record labels, as the company refuses to restrict these exclusives to paying subscribers only. They’ve said that exclusive deals are harmful to musicians and fans alike, which may or may not be a justification they’ve made up after not getting many exclusives.
Look, I tend to agree with the anti side here: exclusive streaming deals are a bit bullshit, and seem like a really great way to wind back the gains streaming music has made against piracy. The whole fucking point of why streaming is winning out over illegal downloads is that paying a few bucks a month to stream music instantly is way more convenient than all the rigamarole around torrenting.
Exclusives take away from that advantage by making streaming music as a whole look like a shitty value proposition. It’ll be real interesting to see where this goes.
Source: AFR.
Photo: Getty Images.
