ADELE STREAMING: WHAT'S THE PLAN? (UPDATE)

There will be no streaming of Adele’s 25 upon its release tomorrow (11/20), including via Apple Music. Will she change her mind? Perhaps, but that's a decision she’ll make at a later date.

This is said to be fundamentally about the fact that the megastar singer/songwriter believes art has value and that freemium devalues it for all artists. This not about money for her personally—she is, as you may have intuited, wealthy beyond belief. But the big streaming services have offered her huge financial incentives.

Adele and manager Jonathan Dickins held back the 2011 blockbuster 21 from Spotify because the streaming service wouldn’t offer it for its paid tier exclusively and keep it off the freemium tier. (This refusal of course prompted Taylor Swift  to hold back her monster 1989.)

And even as Dickins made the above-quoted remarks, he acknowledged, “Streaming is the future,” and acknowledged that fans should be able to listen in all kinds of ways.

Sources close to the project say what the bible has written about the streaming plan is utter hogwash.