ESSAY : Music Industry

Competition among digital music services has escalated as streaming music has gained traction with music fans, and gained market share from paid downloads. In the recent past, an artist would release an album on all formats and territories on the day of release. Physical and digital retailers and their customers and on-demand streaming services and their subscribers all had access to the same repertoire on the same day. In 2016, Beyoncé released \’Lemonade\’ through an exclusive, 24 hour tie-up with Tidal before making her new record available for downloading on iTunes and Amazon. Identify and compare three other recent, exclusive release campaigns. Explain how exclusive windows of release give the streaming service a competitive advantage. Describe how an artist can benefit from exclusive windows of release. Explain how this release strategy benefits or hurts artists, labels, digital music services and music fans in the short term and whether this practice is sustainable in the long term.

SAMPLE SOLUTION

Exclusive Release Campaign

In the recent years, windowing in the music sector has become a thorn in the flesh of most music consumers. Window strategy has ensured that album release is only available through CD or via download for an unspecified period of time. It is apparent that the strategy hinders access of music to consumers since it only allows who have adapted to streaming as means through which they find the latest music. The paper seeks to identify three different campaigns in whose comparisons would help in building insight on whether the notion that exclusive window strategy saves music or it works to build music and artistes’ brands. Kendrick Lamar’s new album marketing campaign had expected his fans to remain upbeat about his anticipated album. Despite the untitled album having several religious overtones, the few hard-hitting tracks made the content marketable in the same manner as the previous albums. After the launch, the album was pulled down from iTunes, yet it remained in Spotify and after a few more hours later, it was back on sale. From these happenings it could be anticipated that Spotify was contracted to do an exclusive release earlier only for iTunes to jump in the deal. Most of the digital music service providers have resorted to the use of this strategy as fundamental shift in recording business through Tidal and Apple Music. These service providers have since sought to explore the music market from as far as Spotify that is the largest streaming entity that gives competitive…