DO STREAMING EXCLUSIVES MATTER?

Will Jay Z’s decision to remove his Blueprint trilogy and other catalog from Spotify and Apple Music, as well as iTunes and Amazon MP3, give his Tidal a big advantage? Well, anything’s possible, of course. But thus far, having superstar exclusives hasn’t lifted Tidal out of the streaming-marketshare basement (the service is believed to have an overall slice of between 1% and 2%).

Meanwhile, market leader Spotify—which has been repeatedly delayed in or deprived of getting superstar releases (Adele, Taylor Swift) due to its freemium tier—enjoys a robust and growing user base.

Which would seem to suggest that when users find a service they like, the absence of even the biggest new releases isn’t necessarily a deterrent. If they want the excluded records, they’ll get them elsewhere (possibly even by signing up for a free trial of a rival service).

This somewhat flies in the face of prevailing logic about streaming, but as the platform grows, many users are finding that depth and breadth of content offerings—beyond current hits—is growing in importance. Some streaming observers say that only about 25% of total streams are of the Top 1,000 songs.