Spotify Is Burying Tracks From Musicians Who Give Exclusives To Apple and Tidal (bloomberg.com)

The music-streaming market is very competitive these days, especially since Apple released Apple Music last year. In retaliation for musicians giving Apple exclusive access to their new music, Spotify has reportedly been making their songs harder to find on its service. Bloomberg reports: "Artists who have given Apple exclusive access to new music have been told they won't be able to get their tracks on featuring playlists once the songs become available on Spotify, said the people [familiar with the strategy], who declined to be identified discussing the steps. Those artists have also found their songs buried in the search rankings of Spotify, the world's largest music-streaming service, the people said. Spotify said it doesn't alter search rankings. Spotify has been using such practices for about a year, one of the people said, though others said the efforts have escalated over the past few months. Artists who have given exclusives to Tidal, the streaming service run by Jay Z, have also retaliated against, the person said, declining to identify specific musicians."

Comments

Re: Sour Grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see how it hurts Spotify. Those tracks are still there, they just won't show up in the automatically generated playlists. I wouldn't promo someone who wrote me out of their new stuff either.

Re:Sour Grapes

[dgatwood]

I don't really understand how this benefits Spotify as it doesn't improve the service in any way that I can see, and such a move likely makes it worse for users for petty business reasons that have nothing to do with the users.

In the short term, the only negative impact would be if the songs they're demoting are extremely popular and if the public perceives their absence as a loss in quality. Given the size of the musical corpus these days, that seems unlikely.

In the long term, this serves notice to content creators that there's no such thing as a free lunch. Normally, those content creators would have to balance the cost of exclusivity (fewer plays on those exclusive songs) against the benefits (presumably dramatically improved promotion and possibly higher royalty per click. With this policy in place, those content creators have to factor in the loss of the vast majority of their income from the other providers—not just on new content, but also on old content. That significantly changes the balance in a way that discourages these exclusive deals.

And that's a good thing. Vendor exclusivity is inherently anti-consumer.

Tit for tat

[Solandri]

It's not sour grapes, it's tit for tat. Treating the artist the same way they're treating you. The artist is telling Spotify that they're not that important to him, so they'll be giving Apple or Tidal an exclusive. Spotify is returning the favor and telling the artist he is not as important to them either, and not promoting him as highly.

Please note that tit for that is one of the best strategies in the Prisoner's Dilemma. Consistently treating others the way they treat you is one of the best ways to get others to treat you better (or as fair as possible given that perfect fairness is impossible).

If the artist relents and gives up the exclusive, but Spotify continues not promoting him, then it's sour grapes, or revenge.