It’s A War Between Streaming Services To Get Artists
Apple & Beats
Who is going to win this streaming game? Spotify? Tidal? or iTunes? Jay Z’s Tidal is the latest in date, enlisting an all-star cast of powerful musicians such as Beyonce, Kanye West, Madonna, Arcade Fire and Taylor Swift…But according to Bloomberg Business, Apple has asked many artists for exclusive deals to promote its new Beats Music.
Florence and the Machine, Taylor Swift are among the artists who were approached by the big company to give the exclusivity to Beats Music, and according to Bloomberg, ‘the idea is that exclusives will be bait for music lovers loathe to pay for subscriptions’. This is just what Tidal did by the way, when it managed to steal artists from Spotify…
Beats Music has been retooled and will launch this summer at a $9.99-a-month subscription for individuals and a family plan for $14.99, so a barely cheaper than Tidal… Meanwhile, I am still using Spotify or YouTube for free, and people in charge are well aware of this problem: ‘Given how easy it is to obtain free streaming music on the Web, any subscription payment gateway needs to involve a differentiator to warrant a pay model like that,’ declared Tom Webster, vice president of strategy and marketing at Edison Research.
According to Rolling Stone, Kanye West said he was offered a few million by Apple, but he turned the offer down to be on Tidal. This war between streaming services is approaching ridiculous war-money summits
We still don’t know much about Tidal, but according to The Verge,Tidal reportedly offered millions of dollars and an equity stake to artists such as Coldplay, Rihanna, Daft Punk, Alicia Keys, Calvin Harris, Jack White, Madonna, Usher, Arcade Fire, Deadmau5,… in exchange of their exclusive content.
Jimmy Iovine, former chairman of the record label Interscope Geffen A&M, rapper-producer Dr. Dre, Trent Reznor are here to revamp the new Beats Music, but will they steal Florence and Taylor? Interestingly, Swift’s albums are on Tidal except her last one, ‘1989’… why is that? How many millions does she want from Apple? Imagine if you may have to pay 2 streaming services to listen to Swift! I am glad I never listen to her crappy pop songs, and all this talk about ‘respect of the art’ we heard from Taylor and others, is just money-talk as usual.
