Apple has long relied on exclusive album releases to push its music streaming service. However, Apple executive Jimmy Iovine has now said that the company now plans to move Apple Music away from exclusive album releases. Even though this has been a primary characteristic of Apple Music, Apple has now decided that it’s not going to rely as much on exclusive album releases as it used to in the past.
In an interview with Music Business Worldwide, Iovine revealed that Apple Music is going to be moving away from exclusive album releases. Saying that the company tried this method, but it’s not going to heavily rely on it in the future. “We’ll still do some stuff with the occasional artist. The labels don’t seem to like it and ultimately it’s their content,” he added.
The music industry itself has been moving away from album exclusives. It was reported last year that record labels were not too interested in fulfilling the appetite for album exclusives that streaming services have. If an album was kept exclusive to one particular streaming service, it meant that labels would lose out on revenue from other services.
The only benefit for artists who signed on for exclusives was that they were given significant marketing push by Apple, but it was hard to judge whether the push was bringing in enough new listeners, which in turn meant that it was hard to quantify whether labels were making any good money off of the exclusives.
This only goes to show that in the future, exclusive album releases will be limited further as labels are not that willing to provide them.
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