I'm a librarian by trade and exclusive deals are the bane of our existence. Whether its scholarly journals or popular ebooks, it's an incredibly inefficient way for us to provide service. Just the overhead of supporting multiple platforms is problematic, never mind how inconvenient it might be for the user.

Well if people just torrented everything instead of giving money to the old pigs with new lipstick, it would be beneficial to all of the groups not wanting to have the Internet regress into the equivalent of unbundled cable TV.

Except for, you know, the people MAKING stuff.

I switched from Rdio to Spotify because the latter allows sideloading your own mp3s into your catalogue. So my Spotify includes Tool, which aren't on any streaming service.

The bottom line is as long as I can buy the content instead of renting I can get it in via sideloading, so it really doesn't matter if the streaming services have excusives.

How many people are interested in streaming Led Zeppelin and don't already own a big chunk of the collection.

Spotify premium subscriber here. What I've heard of LZ is good, but I don't think I've heard anything other than best-of albums. I'd love the chance to listen to their back catalogue.

I gave away / lost / threw away all of my CDs over the last few years. I don't own a stereo, so they just took up space. I think that the artists that refuse to appear on Spotify are very short sighted, they may as well be invisible to a whole generation.

Spotify Premium user here too. To my knowledge the two albums available today (and not before today, as far as I can tell) are the only tracks available that are by Led Zeppelin and not a tribute/cover band.

I am. A few years ago I gave up on CDs and sold my entire collection, including a big chunk of Led Zep

Are you assuming that LZ is not getting new listeners?

Conversely, we've had more than a decade of common music piracy, and it hasn't destroyed the music industry, so who cares if everyone pirates?

It strikes me as an unstable equilibrium a la Prisoners' Dilemma.

I agree that the best situation seems to be one where every service has everything, and they just compete on price, UI, audio quality, reliability, etc. Users can subscribe to the service they like best, services can concentrate on technical excellence instead of negotiating with artists, and artists get access to all users.

However, given that situation, what happens when one of the services decides to negotiate a big exclusive deal with a popular group? This is a huge competitive advantage for them. They'll steal a ton of new users jumping ship from other services. Naturally, a service would try to accomplish this.

How do other services respond? I don't think they'd have any good way to deal with that besides trying to score their own exclusives.

Before long, everything is fragmented and nobody is happy. Users have trouble finding the music they want. Services are stuck fighting over exclusive rights to popular artists. Artists don't get the exposure they want. But they're stuck with it, because the good situation is not stable.

I think that given enough providers it could be stable. Right now we've got just few big players. Spotify, google, itunes, deezer in some places. Some are much bigger than others. Losing 0.5 potential listeners of not that much. But if we had 20+ providers, who would ever accept an exclusive deal? I.e. which artist would go for a "95% of listeners will not be able to access your music, but that's OK, you'll be exclusive and well promoted on our service" (+the deal signing bonus of course)

Exclusivities don't need to last forever. An exclusive of a few months may be enough to acquire additional subscribers while keeping the cost low enough to be justified as an acquisition cost.

Personally, I think exclusives will always be around.

Who's TB?

The Beatles, presumably. Their catalog is an iTunes exclusive, legally at least.

I'm guessing "The Beatles".