Good question. Could be that Apple is more hardware bound and music distributors would need to be quite heavily compensated in order be exclusive apple and miss out on all those people with android phones.

It could also be that people are more willing to make platform purchasing decisions when it comes to video and game exclusivity but not music. This would lead to lower interest to buy exclusivity by the platforms, and thus having full market coverage is more economical for publisher.

Apple Music is available on Android (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.andr...), so there isn't a hardware dependency for that service. It competes more with Spotify than Google Play Music.

The main reason is that licensing works totally differently for music. For music, you go to a central licensing source and pay for the license. They will license to anyone with money.

For movies, you have to negotiate separately with every movie producer for every title.

In other words, to start a music service, you need money. To start a movie service, you need money and connections to every Hollywood studio.

The major DSPs in the music space have to license each music company separately. YouTube, Amazon, Soundcloud, Spotify, Apple - all have individual dealings with the majors and with groups of or individual indies. It's definitely not as simple as requesting a blanket license for all music everywhere and paying a single fee.

Sure, there are three major music companies and six major film studios plus a bunch of major tv networks / distributors but it's still a long set of negotiations.

I think the difference is that the music companies understand the value of each service having ubiquitous access to every piece of music. UMG's decision to stop their artists agreeing exclusives with single platforms demonstrates this to some extent.

In other words, licensing for movies suck and we need to force a change so they can work like music.

But with music the creators don't get paid squat for their content. The middle men make way too much. Part of that is because music is a background thing that is on a lot and repeated where a movies tend to be one-time.

Also, it's not just streaming. I buy all my music as lossless audio and I can do so from any store that offers the format, without DRM or any other strings attached. I actually own the files.

I wish the TV / movie would learn a thing or two from the music industry.

Music has compulsory licensing so anyone can start their own music streaming service. Video does not.