I listen to new music all the time, but pay very little for it. Part of that is owing to the perks of being a hip-hop writer, but mostly it’s because I’ve long subscribed to streaming services. Ten bucks a month covers much of my needs, and YouTube fills in most gaps. Here and there I’ll support an artist I admire by buying their album, or download a track from iTunes, but it’s certainly nothing like the days of yesteryear when I was buying $15.99 DMX and Juvenile CDs. Considering there are millions like me out there, it’s easy to see why the music industry has been suffering for so long.
But recently I’ve started shelling out again. Not out of the goodness of my heart, mind you, but because Tidal and Apple Music have upended the old order with their rap exclusives. I’ve thus been forced to dust off my Platinum card. (Full disclosure: it’s not platinum.)
Take Drake and Future’s recent mixtape, What a Time to Be Alive. For the first five days following its release, it was only available on Apple Music and iTunes. Since I subscribe to Spotify – and since Apple Music isn’t yet available on Android phones like mine – I had no choice but to buy the album, mediocre as it was. The same thing was true with the new Dr Dre album in August, and that one was killer.
None of this has been an accident. In fact, hip-hop is at the center of the streaming wars. Though Taylor Swift grabbed most of the headlines by turning Apple’s hand to pay artist royalties during its launch period, Dr Dre and his partner Jimmy Iovine have emerged as a creative brains trust in the streaming realm. The tech giant’s purchase of Dre and Iovine’s company, Beats, last year was initially thought to be almost entirely about headphones, but now it’s clear that a good chunk of that $3bn Apple paid was for the duo’s vision.
More recently, Apple signed Drake, who has almost single-handedly given the service cachet among the “kids” demographic (say, those whose first exposure to Sir Mix-a-Lot was on Nicki Minaj’s Anaconda). Drake, the company believed, would best “personify and embody the modern musician and how they put their music out online in particular”, Apple’s Larry Jackson told The Fader. Indeed, What a Time to Be Alive was reportedly streamed 29m times in the US in its first three days.
But for hip-hop fans, simply plunking down $9.99 for Apple Music isn’t enough. Tidal, though beleaguered in its early life, has also offered a series of exclusives, including Lil Wayne’s Free Weezy Album, a concert of rarities from one of the service’s owners, Jay Z, the debut of Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé’s video Feelin’ Myself, and a lot more.
It’s getting to the point where if you want to legally consume the rap that’s current, you either have to subscribe to numerous services, or actually buy stuff. You can’t always even cheat and go on YouTube, as Apple has been pulling much of its music from there, too.
“I think for the most part, the idea of exclusives is not good for fans,” Rdio CEO Anthony Bay told Bloomberg earlier this year. “The idea that people will subscribe to multiple music services in order to get just a few songs or a few artists I think is going to slow down the whole category.” On one hand, it sounds like Bay is understandably fearful that Rdio won’t be able to compete in the realm of exclusives. Still, he’s nonetheless right about one thing: this isn’t good for fans. But to me that’s the whole point; the old, all-you-can-eat streaming buffet model has been too good for fans, and has been disastrous for artists. For their sake, the rest of us need to ante up, and like me, most won’t do so unless they’re forced.
Hip-hop has always been a youth-driven music, of course, and rap fans are more likely than most to follow the latest technology. Though this trend helped decimate rap album sales in recent years, at a time when fans of genres like country were still buying CDs, this time hip-hop may be at the vanguard of a change that could benefit the music industry. The challenge, of course, will be getting people to support not just the biggest rappers, but the smaller ones: the ones who can’t get by on less than a penny per stream.
