Topic: Exclusives
Tidal and Sprint’s Exclusive of Jay-Z’s 4:44 Causes Aggravation and Won’t Last Long (Jun 30, 2017)
Jay-Z, one of the principal owners of the Tidal music streaming service, released his latest album, 4:44, on the service last night through a partnership with Sprint, which of course recently invested in the service and gave its subscribers six months’ free access. The intent was clearly to get more people to sign up for the service, while rewarding Sprint customers, but the effect was to aggravate many others who assumed they could merely sign up for the service after the album dropped and then found that it wasn’t available, at least right away. In addition, the exclusive seems pretty porous, and potentially short-lived: iHeartRadio has been streaming the album and will continue to do so for the first day, while Apple Music is reportedly getting the album a week in too. That’s a reflection mostly of the realities of the industry: though Jay-Z and Tidal’s other owners might like the idea of boosting subscriptions through exclusives like this, the reality is that the service has a tiny fraction of global streaming users, and over the long term Jay-Z and other artists are best served by the broadest possible distribution, especially given that he can’t pay himself for the exclusive in the way Apple has paid for them in the past. Exclusives generally seem to be waning as a source of differentiation for music services, but for Tidal its connection to artists (several of whom have been owners) has always been a major selling point. But if even its artist owners aren’t willing to stay the course on exclusives for more than a few days, it doesn’t have much hope of ever reaching significant scale, making the Sprint investment more of a temporary lifeline than true salvation.
via Variety
Essential Phone Will be Exclusive to Sprint in US, Further Limiting Appeal (Jun 12, 2017)
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