Select a region
With multiple streaming platforms never far from your reach there probably hasn’t been an easier time to listen to music.
But some people still won’t have heard Beyonce’s Lemonade, and others would have first listened to Drake’s Views two weeks after it came out – all because the battle between platforms is meaning some albums go exclusively to one or the other.
But Spotify doesn’t have time for that, according to its chief strategy and content officer Stefan Blom, who feels exclusivity deals are bad for the artist too.
“We don’t believe that it is good for the artist,” Blom said, according to Variety. “We are not partaking in that game.”
In 2016 some of the planet’s biggest artists have put out successful albums exclusively through Apple or Tidal. Kanye West, Rihanna and Beyonce all through Tidal (although Ye’s eventually ended up on other platforms), while Apple Music had Drake and Frank Ocean’s albums exclusively for a two-week period.
For the time being though it seems that while Apple and Tidal fight it out for new subscribers, exclusives are something we’re going to have to learn to live with.
