Release of Frank Ocean’s album highlights fading glory of exclusives

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When scholars look back at music in 2016, they will no doubt hone in on Kanye West's impulses. First, in his art: His seventh album The Life of Pablo was released in February, then tweaked endlessly for weeks, largely while an exclusive to the streaming service Tidal. This roll-out was the first of its kind and a sign of what's possible with streaming: an album evolving with the urges of its creator, no one part permanent.

West's uninhibited public pleas will count for as much, if not more. In July, the Tidal co-owner broke the near-silence among streaming stakeholders and executives over the battle for exclusives – yes, including Pablo – calling them, in a stream of tweets, a "dick swinging contest." He continued: "Let the kids have the music."

The kids may soon be all right. Last week, the enigmatic and subversive R&B musician Frank Ocean released two projects, the video album Endless and the record Blonde, only on Apple Music and iTunes. Just days after, industry veteran Bob Lefsetz reported that Universal Music Group – the biggest major label, working with the likes of West, Drake and Ocean through subsidiaries such as Def Jam – will soon put an end to platform-specific exclusives.

The fight for exclusives has been, as best summarized by West, a game of marketing showmanship. It's one that doesn't translate well into music's streaming era. There is a difference between selling CDs exclusively at either HMV or Walmart and streaming an album on only Tidal or Apple Music. Someone who likes both Beyoncé and Frank Ocean could go to different record stores to buy each CD, but digital exclusives tend to force streaming consumers to double down on their $10 monthly payments when they were already promised they paid for most recorded music in history. That, or they turn to piracy.

Should Universal move away from exclusives, other labels would almost certainly follow. Competition among leading services – namely Spotify, Tidal and Apple Music – would then be reframed on each's merits, rather than asking consumers to decide based on a favourite artist, with the potential to alter the streaming landscape significantly.

There's more. Blonde doesn't list Ocean's usual label Def Jam in its copyright credit, but rather a mysterious new label, Boys Don't Cry. If it turns out to be an independent label – meaning Endless, the long video released a day earlier, fulfilled his Def Jam contract – then Ocean may receive vastly more money for Blonde. Universal's move to kill exclusives, then, would be a defensive one: a Hail Mary pass to justify the existence of major labels and their overhead costs in the age of digital distribution.

Few streaming stakeholders have been publicly frank about Ocean and exclusives. Representatives for Universal, Ocean and Tidal did not respond to The Globe's requests for comment before publication; Apple declined to comment; and a Spotify spokesperson reiterated the Swedish company's long-held opposition to long-term exclusives.

Despite this week's silence, in an April conference call, executives from the world's three major labels expressed mildly hesitant acceptance when asked by The Globe and Mail about exclusives. Michael Nash, Universal's executive vice-president of digital strategy, said short-term exclusives "can be" positive in growing the streaming market, but that "we all want to see that music subscribers are getting access to most of the music they care about."

Frank Ocean's fans have waited four years for a follow-up to his studio debut, channel Orange – an album that was heralded as a pinnacle of contemporary R&B, with delicious textures, unconventional singles and compelling narratives within the album and its creation. (Ocean came out just before its release, breaking a huge barrier for black male hip-hop artists.) He's been teasing a new album for years, upping the game in recent weeks with mysterious carpentry livestreams and Snapchat filters.

Fans finally got what they wanted last week. But for now, they can only get it on Apple Music. And not all of Ocean's fans are there.

Spotify, which has both an ad-supported free tier and a $10-a-month subscription, is one of the pioneers of the today's favoured all-access streaming model. It boasts more than 100 million users, 30 million of whom pay. The company has a poor relationship with Taylor Swift, who has a strong stance against low-royalty free streaming. After releasing 2014's 1989 for sale-only, she pulled her back catalog from Spotify, and hasn't been back since.

Swift did, however, join Apple Music when it launched in June, 2015, after the tech giant assured her it'd pay royalties during its free trial period.

And for the past 14 months, both Apple and Tidal – the latter co-owned by a cabal of artists including West, Jay Z and Arcade Fire – have been jockeying to land exclusives for a few weeks (West's Pablo and Rihanna's Anti on Tidal, Drake's Views and supposedly Ocean's Blonde on Apple Music) or the long term (Beyoncé's Lemonade on Tidal, Swift's 1989 on Apple Music and Google Play).

This has made for great marketing in their quests to topple Spotify as the world's streaming leader. Except that Spotify remains on top: Apple Music turned one year old in June with 15 million subscribers, and Tidal's numbers are reported to be as low as 4.2 million. In the search for solutions, rumours abound: The Wall Street Journal has reported that Apple wants to buy Tidal.

It's a distribution-channel stalemate that can severely limit an artist's audiences. And it's roused the ire of a $15-billion (U.S.) record industry that's depending on streaming to offset declining sales and continue the rare year-over-year growth it claimed to see in 2015.

The Lefsetz-led rumours that Universal may exit the exclusive race might keep that growth. If Sony, Warner and independent labels follow, consumers won't be forced to either pirate music or pay twice the price – they could get it all, wherever they choose, just like Kanye West wants the kids to have.

And if Frank Ocean has indeed pulled off a label-free exclusive, he may even outweigh West in the history books for upending conventional album narratives. Maybe it takes an Ocean to open the stream for everyone.