This past week, rappers Future and Drake teamed up for a collaborative mixtape, called "What a Time to Be Alive," that was supposed to be released last Sunday, Sept. 20, at 8 p.m.
As a music reviewer, this one was important to get to. I got home, excited to finally hear this release. I booted up my laptop, hopped on Spotify, and searched for Drake's name.
Nothing.
"Alright," I said to myself, "Maybe it was released under Future's name."
Nothing.
And nothing under the name of the mixtape either.
It's at this point that I realized that I missed something important in all of the pre-release press of the mixtape: it's an exclusive to Apple Music and iTunes.
"Well, shit."
I got indignant about it. "I already pay for Spotify; why should I subscribe to Apple Music as well just to hear this mixtape?"
I'm sure Drake and Future are getting more kickbacks from Apple than they would from Spotify, hence their inclination to make the mixtape exclusive. But in today's culture, exclusivity doesn't encourage purchase; it encourages piracy.
Episodes of HBO's fantasy show "Game of Thrones" frequently break records of being the most pirated episode in television history, records that were often set by previous episodes in the series.
Much of this can be attributed to the relative difficulty of watching an HBO show.
You have to pay extra through your cable subscription to get HBO. You cannot watch HBO shows on any other streaming platform besides HBOGo. And, until recently, you could not access HBOGo unless you were already a subscriber to HBO through your cable.
Or, you could just pirate "Game of Thrones." A lot of people took this path, instead.
And that is exactly what Drake, Future, Dr. Dre, Taylor Swift, and others who are opting to release music exclusively through Apple Music and iTunes are doing to themselves.
Making music exclusive to certain platforms is supposed to incentivize me to pay for those platforms in addition to the ones I already pay for. What it actually does, though, is incentivize me to find other means of listening to it.
A friend of a friend let me borrow Taylor Swift's "1989" after she pulled it from Spotify. My iTunes account automatically ripped the mp3s from the album, and now I have them, without ever having paid for it. I can listen to "Shake It Off" as much as I want, and Taylor will never see a cent from me, when she would've if I were allowed to stream it through Spotify.
Similarly, I'll plead the fifth as to how I did it, but I was able to listen to "What a Time to Be Alive" (and it honestly wasn't that great but that's not the point). Drake and Future won't make any money from that, either.
By trying to force me into making a purchase when I already subscribe to a service that is meant to accomplish the same goals, these artists are simply alienating me, and presumably other listeners.
And to any artist that might be reading this, I honestly want to support you. I just can't afford to subscribe to multiple streaming platforms, let alone buy a physical copy of every album I want. If you want the listeners to support you, it should be on the listeners' terms.
