The Problem With Music Streaming Services
Share:
Last week, the first advert in Apple Music’s latest campaign was released. It is a collaborative effort with Taylor Swift, and admittedly the advert is funny: it sees Swift falling off a treadmill because she is too busy rapping along to Drake and Future’s ‘Jumpman’. It is pretty ironic that Taylor Swift, who once campaigned against Apple Music, is now advertising for them. Unfortunately it shows that money, and the companies that have it, is seeping into music availability.
This also brings to attention an issue that has been growing more and more present in recent times: the competition between music streaming services. There are a huge number of streaming services out there, with the current key players being Spotify, Tidal, Beatport, Soundcloud, YouTube and Apple Music. The market is somewhat saturated, and so some of these streaming services seem to be following in the footsteps of many TV streaming services: they are making artists release their music exclusively to a single service. This means Dr Dre’s Compton is only on Apple Music, Rihanna and Kanye West’s latest albums were only on Tidal, and so the consumer would have to sign up for multiple streaming services just to be able to hear all the new releases from some of the biggest artists in the industry. Obviously this is impractical as all the monthly subscription fees would stack up.
It will be interesting to see if this problem gets worse with time, as competition gets more and more fierce, or if artists will rebel in order to maintain musical integrity, or if pirating music will become an even bigger issue as a result.