Just over two years since launching, country musician Garth Brooks’ Ghost Tunes download store is passing into the afterlife.
Well, shutting down: Billboard reports that an email sent to customers cites a “new partnership with Amazon” as reason for them to transfer their purchases to Amazon’s cloud service, and check out its Amazon Music Unlimited streaming service.
Ghost Tunes originally launched in November 2014 alongside Brooks’ comeback album ‘Man Against Machine’, complete with deals to sell music from all three major labels as well as various independents, and the promise of an 80% revenue share for rightsholders rather than the industry-standard 70%.
“We’re going up against Google, Amazon, iTunes: billion-dollar companies,” said CEO Randy Bernard at the time. “What happens if they change their models and have better economic deals?”
What actually happened, seemingly, was that Ghost Tunes discovered the hardships of being a non-iTunes music-downloads store at a time of quickening industry transition to streaming.
In October 2016, Brooks announced an exclusive deal with Amazon for his own music, with this week’s Ghost Tunes news a development for that.
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