Spotify has officially amassed more than 39 million paid subscribers, meaning the streaming service's paid tier is growing faster than ever. The company has also reportedly instituted a new exclusives policy which is intended to de-emphasize promotion for music that has received prior exclusive release on other streaming services.
Several months ago, former artist manager Troy Carter was brought on to an executive role at Spotify. It was reportedly for the job of making the streaming service catch up to its paid competitors Apple Music and Tidal in terms of bagging exclusive music windows for new releases from top artists. Tidal has been particularly aggressive in this area, with recent exclusives from A-list artists such as Rihanna and Kanye West, while Apple has managed to score releases from Drake, Katy Perry, and just this month, Frank Ocean.
It appeared Carter was the right man for that job, after managing the careers of many top music artists, most notably that of Lady Gaga. Now it seems as if Carter and Spotify have taken a different route — rather than attempting to bag new exclusive releases from artists, they are instead looking to essentially "punish" releases by artists who have released exclusives on other streaming services prior to their eventual debut on Spotify.
The streaming service plans to do this by de-emphasizing the promotion of the artists' music and featuring it less prominently on Spotify's platform. That could include not releasing that music on Spotify at all, or not placing it on any or as many Spotify playlists.
The news comes just as another blow to the exclusivity wave for streamers hitting the headlines. Lucian Grainge, chairman of Universal Music Group, reportedly stated in an internal memo that the company will no longer be doing exclusive deals with their artists to have their music released on only one streaming service.
That mirrors Carter's recent argument that such deals are "bad for artists, bad for consumers and bad for the whole industry." It seems as if rather than lining up exclusives for artists, Carter's new role at Spotify is focused instead on convincing major players that such deals should not in fact exist on any platform.
The lack of exclusives certainly doesn't appear to have hurt Spotify's bottom line. Carter also announced that the company has now amassed more than 39 million paid subscribers, an increase of 9 million since March, indicating a growth rate of almost 2 million subscribers per month. That's the fastest Spotify's paid tier has ever grown, good news for the company that plans to ultimately make itself public in an upcoming IPO.
