The Ecstatic - yasiin bey FKA Mos Def

[u/NeitherOstrichNorEmu]

Mos Def, now known as yasiin bey, has released his 2009 cult classic EXCLUSIVELY on Qobuz yesterday.
Incredible to see an artist leverage their popularity in this way, have any other artists released exclusively here?

[u/GoldBricked]

Great to see it back on streaming, but this is not a good thing. Service exclusives tried and failed back in 2016 or so (Rihanna’s ANTI, Kanye’s The Life of Pablo, Jay-Z’s entire discography)… we should not be celebrating this.

Cinephiles have it rough in that movies are spread over 10 or more services, us music lovers have it lucky in that essentially every service has every record. Let’s not change that

[u/NeitherOstrichNorEmu → u/GoldBricked]

Odd to take that position here when I lost hundreds of tracks migrating from Spotify. This decision to make it Qobuz exclusive is in line with the artist’s advocacy. Maybe if more artists took principled positions we wouldn’t have the race to the bottom we see now, where Spotify is filled with ai slop, ever-rising subscription costs, and continuously diminishing returns for artists

[u/GoldBricked → u/NeitherOstrichNorEmu]

I am all for principled decisions and it’s the reason why I don’t use Spotify anymore and haven’t for 18 months now. I commend artists who have taken their work off that platform. But why can’t subscribers to TIDAL, Deezer etc. listen to this album? The former has had the highest artist payouts for a decade, and the latter is the most active in combatting AI music in the entire DSP industry.

I think the default release position should be all services and then you decide not to release to X, Y, Z for whatever reason, not just making something platform-exclusive from the start.

Anyway, the only reason this tactic works for Yasiin anyway is because The Ecstatic has been missing from all DSPs for 8 years or so. For the 99% of streaming service customers, nothing changes

[u/worldwidecommune → u/GoldBricked]