Spotify Giving Less Promotion to Apple, Tidal Exclusives: Report

Spotify Giving Less Promotion to Apple, Tidal Exclusives: Report

Premiering an album exclusively on Apple Music or Tidal may come back to haunt artists once their music arrives on Spotify, as The New York Times reports. Spotify informed executives at two major labels that it has a new policy not to promote music as heavily or include it on as many playlists if it had previously enjoyed an exclusive deal with another streaming service, the executives told the Times. Spotify declined to comment on the report to the Times as well as to Pitchfork.

The balance of conflicting interests underlying the digital-era music industry has come sharply into focus with the release last week of Frank Ocean’s Endless visual album and Blonde album, both Apple exclusives. Endless fulfilled Ocean’s commitment to Universal Music Group and Def Jam, and Blonde was self-released, according to sources. Universal head Lucian Grainge quickly put word out to label executives that they will no longer do global, single-platform exclusives, though it was unclear if they might still make smaller deals. 

Spotify’s global head of creator services, Troy Carter, said in a Billboard interview this week that “exclusives are bad for artists, bad for consumers, and bad for the whole industry.” Rather, he reportedly quipped a pledge of “Spotify inclusives.” Carter, the founder/CEO 0f artist management firm Atom Factory and former manager of Lady Gaga, announced in June that he was joining Spotify. “I was brought on board to strengthen the bridge between Spotify and the music community,” he told Billboard.

Carter’s comments reiterated what Jonathan Prince, global head of communications and public policy at Spotify, told Mashable in April. “We believe long-term exclusives are bad for artists and they’re bad for fans,” Prince said in a statement. “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.”

Read our explorations into the streaming business “Is the Era of Free Streaming Music Coming to an End?” and “Up Next: How Playlists Are Curating the Future of Music.”

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