We’ve written regularly in the last year about the shift in definitions of ‘exclusives’ on music-streaming services.
Bar the odd exception, few albums are now exclusive to a single service, but Apple Music, Spotify and others are competing instead for exclusive access to artists in other ways: documentaries for example, or live events.
The latest example of the latter is Arcade Fire, who will be celebrating the release of their fifth album ‘Everything Now’ next Friday with a free gig in Brooklyn the night before.
It’ll be exclusively livestreamed on Apple Music, with an audio broadcast on Beats 1 to boot:
Of relevance here: Arcade Fire’s Win Butler and Régine Chassagne appeared on-stage at Tidal’s infamous relaunch event, billed as co-owners of that service in March 2015.
Just over two years on, and the big launch event for their new album is only on Tidal’s much-bigger rival Apple Music. Oof.
Perhaps this shouldn’t be a surprise: Butler did say a few months after the Tidal event that “none of the artists knew anything about the PR. It was a poorly managed launch”. Something tells us the Apple livestream won’t be open to similar accusations.
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