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Apple Seeking Songs Exclusive To Its Beats Music Service

Apple Seeking Songs Exclusive To Its Beats Music Service

Apple is purportedly approaching today's top musical artists to provide exclusive tracks for its Beats Music streaming subscription service. The tech giant is reportedly courting the likes of country superstar Taylor Swift and indie rockers Florence and the Machine and other recording artists in order to ink a partnership with them that would allow Beats Music to stream exclusive audio material from these musicians, as recently reported by Bloomberg.

 

Music streaming services is a particularly competitive field, with established service providers like Pandora and Spotify having been at it for several years. Apple can be considered as a late player to the game, considering that it has only ventured into music streaming subscription in the last few years.

 

Whilst digital downloads overall are on the decline, music streaming is showing growth. This is partly why Apple is getting ready to relaunch the rebranded Beats Music, even as iTunes gets affected by the decreasing popularity of digital downloads. If Beats Music takes off with the masses, then Apple will have fully justified its $3 billion acquisition of the Beats company a year ago.

 

Seeking out exclusive artist material is nothing new, especially among music streaming service providers. Apple has an advantage because of iTunes, which as of now, is still the biggest seller of digital downloads, which is something that might appeal to those musicians who want their music to be distributed and sold to as many listeners as possible. 

 

But it is far from being a guarantee. iTunes may be the biggest in terms of digital downloads, but Beats Music, Apple's channel for streaming music, is not that big, even in music streaming standards. When Apple bought Beats Music last year, the music streaming subscription service only had 250,000 members. Now compare that with the industry leaders such as Spotify, which already amassed 15 million paid members as of the end of 2014. Spotify may have a better chance of landing exclusive music deals because it has a wider reach (15 million strong) and it has already established itself as sort of a trusted brand when it comes to music streaming. As for Beats Music, it may already be part of the Apple brand, but it still needs to develop its own customer base.

 

But still, this is Apple we are talking about. It just might be able to pull it off. Who knows by the end of the year, we could see Taylor Swift and Florence and the Machine become Beats Music exclusive artists.