Streaming Could End Piracy, If Only The Music Business Would Let It

While windowing releases may be an effective marketing ploy for high profile artists like Adele and Kanye, such tactics serve to drive listeners to piracy, in a time when the music industry should be embracing – and improving on – streaming instead.

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Guest Post by Bryce Clemmer, Co-founder and CEO of Vadio.In many ways, Kanye West’s release of his album/conceptual art project “The Life of Pablo” showed that he’s a groundbreaking artist when it comes to his thinking in the digital space. From his full-throated embrace of social media to his “lean startup” approach of releasing songs quickly, West is at the cutting edge — except in one respect. When it came time to officially release his album on 2/14, he chose to post it exclusively on the streaming service Tidal. Within a few days, the album was climbing the charts, albeit the chart of most pirated albums.

West is an investor in Tidal, so the deal probably makes some sense for him, but it sets a concerning example for the music world at large. It’s easy to point to stars like West, Adele, and Taylor Swift, all of whom have windowed their releases by releasing content exclusively on one platform or not making their music available on streaming sites at all and still been successful– but they are the exceptions, not the norm. And rather than realizing this, some in the music industry are looking to do more limited releases; label executives have recently announced plans to do more exclusive digital releases.What they fail to realize is that digital and physical exclusives are not the same thing. Asking someone to drive a few extra miles to a store for a one-time album purchase is very different than asking them to sign up for a service that can cost upwards of $120 per year in order to access a single album. According to a Deloitte study, the average millennial spends $125 a year on music media, and the average per capita spend is only $48, so it seems unrealistic to expect people to greatly increase their music media budget in order to absorb this exclusive content The rise of paid streaming services has helped cut piracy rates tremendously, but it remains a problem. There will always be a handful of people who choose to pirate content no matter what, but many people would rather consume in a more legitimate way, if only for the relative ease. As anyone who spent time on Napster back in the day, or a torrent site today, knows, the user experience is lacking. Most people would rather use YouTube, or Soundcloud, or a streaming service to listen to music — but when they can’t get that content via any of those destinations, they figure out a way around it.Creating false scarcity in an age of abundance is a fool’s errand that will only serve to push people towards piracy. The current solutions are a great start, but by no means comprehensive — according to a survey by MusicWatch, many of those who pirate music want to “own” a copy of a song on their smartphone, citing concerns about data usage and the fact that they can’t get copies of remixes or bootlegs through legal means. If a marketplace could be created to address those needs, that could help solve the problem. Making streaming music content available all over the web, rather than just in certain apps or on certain sites, could also help artists monetize their content and listeners and viewers consume without resorting to piracy. The music business can push the boulder uphill all it wants, but the consumers have spoken, and they want more access and more music. This is a golden opportunity to make content available and monetizable — the industry just needs to shed past ideas and let it happen.