Streaming Exclusives, Universal, and Repeating History

Universal Music Group (UMG) recently banned all of it’s artists from signing exclusive deals with streaming services. If you’re someone who listens to a lot of music you’ll likely take a huge sigh of relief hearing that. Streaming sites picking up exclusives has made it incredibly difficult to listen to our favorite artists’ music and nowadays it’s becoming more and more commonplace from large artists like Drake debuting content on Apple Music to Jay-Z removing some of his classic albums on every subscription site except TIDAL. But a lot of this is done without the record label involved, which is always an eyebrow raiser. Record labels are businesses, after all, and they’re going to want the proper cut they deserve from their investments.

Frank Ocean apparently broke the camel’s back when he released Endless — a video album released on Apple Music — to end his contract with Universal and independently release his real album Blonde (Blond?) as an exclusive also on Apple Music. Endless won’t even be on Billboard. In other words, UMG gets a cut of a video people are watching only a few times while Frank Ocean gets a cut from the much larger release that people will have on repeat for years to come. After four years of waiting for one their biggest artists to release their long awaited and certainly lucrative album, Universal got put aside for a direct deal between Apple & Ocean.

Ouch.

The label Drake is signed to (Young Money) is one of the many child labels of UMG; Drake currently has an exclusivity deal with Apple Music, which is why Views and the viral Hotline Bling video debuted only on that platform. This is likely what’s got Kanye so vocal about Apple Music as well: Drake and Kanye have apparently recorded an unreleased album and West’s ties with TIDAL have probably made the release…difficult. Does Drake continue with his partners at Apple or does Kanye have a responsibility as a part owner of TIDAL to release it there? Now how this would likely have ended is Drake would release some mixtapes, albums, or video albums (*cough*) to end his deal with Apple so Kanye can release their joint album as a TIDAL exclusive. But now, UMG has basically blocked that move with this new rule.

But wait, it gets worse. Spotify also just announced that artists releasing exclusives on their competitors’ platforms will be demoted in their search results and banned from curated playlists. And the Frank Ocean album is still not on Spotify! Like Universal, I’m very unhappy right now.

The impact this decision is going to have on the industry is undeniable. UMG owns approximately 40% of the recorded music sales market and it’s going to make things really awkward for some of their biggest stars. TIDAL, a streaming service born “for the artists,” can no longer leverage their biggest strength: owners like Madonna, Nicki Minaj, and Lil’ Wayne exclusively releasing content for their gigantic fanbase. Oh, and Dr. Dre — executive at Apple — is under UMG as well. If there was still a Detox (yeah, no) on the way, this would likely discourage the Doctor even more from releasing it.

While I’m all about artists getting their share, the streaming sites are playing a dangerous game and for once in my life I’m siding with the record labels. Universal may be doing this for their own gains, but they’ve also seen something very similar happen a little over a decade ago and I’m surprised it took them this long to take action. If we go back to the early 2000s, you’ll remember this little piece of freeware known as Napster. Back then, if you wanted music, you had two options: either go to a music or electronics store and buy a whole album even if you just want a single song or freely download the tracks you wanted from Napster. Sure, free music was great, but it was the accessibility of music that Napster really succeeded at.

A few years later, a bunch of companies — most notably Apple — released digital stores for music and made bootlegging a little less appealing. They proved that if you can make it easy to get music, most people will buy it legally. This eventually became even more accessible with the birth of subscription sites like Spotify. Today, discovering new music or listening to songs you’ve already heard is literally a couple of taps away and most people are finally okay with putting a little money in for their favorite artists.

What streaming sites are doing with these exclusives is making it difficult for fans to access their favorite artists — again. Very few people are going to have a Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, and YouTube subscription just so they can access a pick few artists from specific sites. I doubt people are willing to pay $40/month so they can listen to their music fragmented across multiple sites. And what have we learned from the past? There are very easy ways for people to get all their music from a single place and, unfortunately, it’s not going to make the artists — or labels — any money. When people want to hear Drake, they don’t want to have to remember what site he releases his music on, they just want to hear it.

For an industry that’s consistently been at war with their very own customers, the labels had a really easy way out of a horrible bootlegging problem. Now, streaming sites are recreating it within what the labels thought would be the solution. No, labels are not always the role model companies you’d want them to be, but this time around they may just be helping the fans while also making their cut. Hopefully this battle’s end will make sure that artists get their fair cut as well and they won’t need to take backdoor opportunities to make more money from their art.