With a number of artists signing off their album rights to music streaming websites, what can we poor people turn to?

Frank Ocean’s album ‘Blonde’ came out a while back but only an exclusive few were allowed access to it. And by exclusive, we mean those connected to Apple Music.

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With more and more online streaming companies vying for exclusive deals with artists, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for listeners to get a taste of music that has been launched by a streaming website they haven’t registered to.

Apple Music, built on top of the company’s $3 billion purchase of Beats, and Tidal, the service owned by Jay Z, have been the most aggressive in signing up exclusives. According to the New York Times, Tidal got more than one million customers to create accounts in the first week that Beyonce’s album Lemonade was released. Spotify was recently reported to have penalised artists for signing exclusive deals with rivals by making their music harder to find.

 

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And don’t think of it as a monopoly. The other players in the market aren’t far behind. Amazon might be the next big player in the streaming market as it’s planning to launch a streaming music option very soon. Even Pandora might be a step closer to finding an alternative to their thriving online radio service with an on-demand streaming service.

Furthermore, every listener’s favourite go-to streaming site, YouTube, has found itself under the legal spotlight for hosting unauthorised videos in the past. Though the quality of these videos might not match that of the authorised streaming channel, it still provided listeners the chance to sample the artist’s work. Now they are forced to become a part of the ongoing streaming wars as competitors try to get the best deals from the artists. Not to mention, illegal downloading has become a huge deal ever since.

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What more, with a host of competitors about to explode on to the streaming scene, listeners are going to miss out on a lot of good music because they won’t have access to it until they are game for subscribing to every streaming channel there is!

Kinda asking for too much, don’t you think?