Exclusives are terrible for consumers and even worse for the music industry as a whole
Beyonce from her new visual album, "Lemonade." |
I've got good news and bad news.
The good news: Beyonce dropped a new album over the weekend,
and it's incredibly good.
The bad news: Beyonce's new album is exclusive to just two
platforms - iTunes, where you can only purchase the album at full price, and
Tidal, the streaming music service that's partially owned by her husband Jay Z.
Now, I don't care to disparage Tidal or Apple or Beyonce's
choice to make her album exclusive through those services. I can't blame
Beyonce for trying to make more money for what she does - that's something we
all strive to do. But I do believe this recent trend - for big name artists to
release music exclusively through certain platforms and not others - is
absolutely terrible for consumers.
Exclusives defeat the purpose of streaming music services
Streaming music services exist because they're convenient
and good for consumers: Instead of buying a standalone album for $10, you could
spend that same money each month to get all the music you could possibly want.
It doesn't matter what you listen to or how much you listen to it, you simply
pay each month to get access to a massive catalogue of music. But what happens when your favorite artist releases a new
album and you can't access it over your music service?
Beats 1
Zane Lowe is one of the hosts of Apple's 24/7 radio service,
Beats 1.
It's
okay for streaming services to differentiate themselves a little bit. I don't
mind that Apple Music has a unique 24-hour radio service (Beats 1) while others
don't, and I don't mind that Spotify is the only service that has something
like Discover Weekly, which creates an incredible mixtape for you each week
based off your music tastes.
Differentiating music services becomes a problem, however,
when music services start to offer slightly different (not entirely different)
catalogs of music.
For example, Beyonce and Kanye West are in allegiance with
Tidal (Kanye's facing some legal trouble after initially saying his latest
album would never be on Apple Music, even though it currently is). Drake,
meanwhile, will release his next album (coming this weekend) as an Apple Music
exclusive. Taylor Swift is also an Apple Music artist; she refuses to put her
music on any other streaming service.
This is a huge problem for anyone who loves all of these
artists. (And many people do.)
It's bad when all your favorite artists are divided by the
various music services that court them (see: pay them extra money) to go
exclusive. This practice is great for lining artists' pockets, but it's awful
for consumers.
Nobody - and I mean nobody - wants three separate music
libraries and three separate applications to access that music. And certainly
nobody wants to pay $10 per month per service.
If you want Apple Music and Spotify and Tidal, you'll have
to pay three times what you'd pay for just one of those services, even though
the vast majority of their catalogs and features overlap.
Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for Roc Nation
The artists of Tidal, from left to right: Usher, Rihanna,
Nicki Minaj, Madonna, DeadMau5, Kanye West, Jay-Z, and The Weeknd.
Exclusives encourage piracy
Exclusives aren't just bad because they force people to pay
more money to own separate, slightly different silos for their music. They're also bad for artists, too, since exclusivity
encourages piracy.
We saw it in February with Kanye West's new album, "The
Life of Pablo," which broke
piracy records when it launched as a Tidal exclusive.
Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images It
also happened to Beyonce a few years ago when she launched her self-titled
album as an iTunes exclusive. And piracy of Beyonce's newest album is reportedly
following a similar trajectory to Kanye's highly pirated album.
You see the problem here, right?
All the innovation around music over the last 15 years has
been about defeating piracy. Online stores provided a more legitimate way to
purchase and own music on multiple devices, instead of just copying CDs or
downloading random MP3s from dubious services like Napster and Limewire. Then
streaming services came along as a cheaper and more convenient way to listen to
music instead of buying it: You pay a small monthly fee to listen to all kinds
of music, even if you don't actually own any of it.
Streaming services are continually getting better, but the
practice of selling exclusive albums and creating exclusivity windows - where
fans on certain platforms can't listen to new music for a period of time - is
encouraging piracy once again.
In this regard, I've got to give credit to the few streaming
services that aren't simply trying to court big name artists into signing exclusivity
deals, like Spotify, which provided the following statement to Tech Insider:
We believe long-term exclusives are bad for artists and
they're bad for fans. Artists want as many fans as possible to hear their
music, and fans want to hear the music they're excited about - exclusives get
in the way of both. Of course, we understand that short promotional exclusives
are common, we don't have a total policy against them, and we certainly respect
the choice of artists to decide what's right for them. Bottom line, we're
looking forward to sharing Beyonce's awesome new music with her millions of
Spotify fans as soon as we can.
We also reached out to Tidal. The company was not
immediately available to comment.
Still, I really hope other services and artists follow suit:
Exclusives and windowed exclusives have absolutely no benefits for consumers or
music fans. It's fine that artists want to make more money, but it shouldn't be
at the expense of their fans, many of whom cannot afford to multiple different
services.