Will the music industry never learn?

The announcement that Garth Brooks has signed an exclusive streaming deal with Amazon Music suggests that the music industry is about to repeat the same mistakes that saw it lose huge numbers of customers over the course of decade.

Right now, fragmentation is the last thing the music industry needs. At a time when growing numbers of people are now signing up to streaming platforms, with Spotify reaching forty million paying subscribers worldwide out of a hundred million total, Apple Music with more than fifteen million, and a host of other platforms such as Tidal Amazon Music, Google Music, YouTube Music, etc., are all competing for the public’s favor, few things are more likely to discourage people signing up than incomplete platforms, whereby you pay your monthly subscription fee only to find that some of your favorite artists are missing.

And yet, fragmentation seems to be where we’re headed. Right now, the list of artists only available on one service or not available in all services continues to grow. In addition to artists who simply do not want to be in any of them, right now if you decide to pay for Apple Music, you won’t be able to listen to British artists like Adele, White Stripes, Weekend, The Strokes, Def Leppard or Queens of the Stone Age. If you choose Spotify, you can forget about Taylor Swift, Prince, Jason Aldean or Thom Yorke, or that Adele, Coldplay, Radiohead and Black Keys decide to remove their songs for a period. You may also come across another disturbing trend: according to Bloomberg, artists who sign exclusive deals barely register in recommendation algorithms.

Tidal is another service that seems obsessed with exclusive deals: a few artists, usually related to Jay Z, like his wife, Beyonce, or his pal Kanye West, who have released their latest recordings exclusively for this platform, albeit for a limited time, given that it is a relatively small player.

The trend seems to be driven more by artists than their record label, but assigning responsibilities is not easy. Overall, a record company should be able to pressure almost any artist it has signed to offer their music where it wants, although this may be more difficult in the case of highly acclaimed artists. What nobody in the industry seems to understand is that fragmentation, far from creating competition, is having the opposite effect and creating doubt in many people’s minds about whether to pay for this or that platform.

If the trend continues, I predict difficult times for streaming services. The root of the problem is a misunderstanding of what competition means. One thing is to compete in terms of interface, algorithmic recommendation, versatility or presence. But competing in terms of artists, even though well established within the industry, is a mistake. Given the way consumers have grown accustomed over the years to simply typing the name of a song into their browser and download it instantly, the idea of paying for a platform and not finding their music makes no sense. Let’s not forget that it wasn’t legal action that reduced unlicensed downloading, it was the availability of low-cost streaming that provided access to a wide range of musicians. If that is no longer the case, then the music industry could find itself back to square one, all over again.

(En español, aquí)