Roger Fingas
While Apple is buying exclusives to keep music off rival streaming services, its main competitor — Spotify — is reportedly firing back by "burying" content from artists who sign those deals.
Artists who debut tracks as Apple Music exclusives are being told they won't get their music on featured Spotify playlists, Bloomberg said on Friday, citing anonymous sources. Moreover, these musicians are said to be finding their songs lower in Spotify's search rankings, potentially impacting the amount of plays — and hence royalties — that each track generates.
While one source claimed that Spotify has been using these tactics for about a year, others suggested that the company has intensified its campaign in recent months. The approach is also supposedly being applied to artists with exclusives on Tidal.
An unnamed singer-songwriter allegedly cancelled plans to launch a song on Zane Lowe's Beats 1 show, worried that they would lose promotional backing on Spotify.
The company remains the global leader in on-demand streaming, with over 30 million paid subscribers compared to Apple Music's 15 million. It also has even more people using its free ad-based tier, though it pulls in significantly less revenue from that audience and needs to convert more of it if it intends to turn a profit.
In fact Apple Music is growing fast, and doesn't necessarily need to turn a profit, as it's mainly a way of luring or locking people into Apple's hardware ecosystem. The service is available on Android, but deeply integrated into iOS devices.
Further pressure on Apple's use of exclusives is coming from Universal Music Group, which recently mothballed all exclusives with Apple Music or otherwise. The company is one of the four major international labels, and hence a weak spot in Apple's exclusivity strategy.
Update: In a response to allegations that it buries music from artists who release their work as exclusives on other services, Spotify told Recode that the claims are "unequivocally false."
Charles Martin
Christine McKee
Wesley Hilliard
Malcolm Owen
Andrew Orr
William Gallagher
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27 Comments
It's one thing to not put them on featured or promoted playlists, a bit petty, but not completely crooked. It's another to tamper with your search algorithms to punish artists you don't like. To me that's a real crappy move that should be slapped down by public opinion and artist outrage.
...so then will that make those artists even more 'exclusive'...?
Shitty move.
Pay the artists table scraps and then bite the hand that feeds you(artists) by feeding them even less scraps.
Oh yeah, artists are gonna love daddy spotty.
Can you imagine the outrage if it were Apple doing this?
Ah, the crybabies at Spotify are showing us all once again how they run their business like 12 year olds.
First they keep whining to the public about how unfair Apple is with their subscription policies (multiple times), then they whine about their App being rejected when they knew damn well they were going against App Store policies, then they claim Apple is trying to hurt them by requesting higher royalties to be paid and now they're being petty with musicians.
And people say Apple needs to be better than Spotify to take over? They're already better than those bunch of whiners.