This weekend Tidal and HBO scored big with exclusive access to Beyoncé’s new album Lemonade which debuted on HBO Saturday night. The visual album, which Slate describes as “stunning” and “phenomenal,” is available for purchase on iTunes, but fans can only stream Lemonade from Tidal, the premium subscription music service partially owned by Jay Z, Beyoncé’s husband.

According to Mashable, the exclusive streaming arrangement with Tidal will continue “in perpetuity,” and rival streaming service Spotify isn’t happy. In a statement to Mashable, Jonathan Prince, global head of communications and public policy at Spotify, explained that long-term exclusives hurt both artists and fans.

“We believe long-term exclusives are bad for artists and they’re bad for fans. Artists want as many fans as possible to hear their music, and fans want to hear the music they’re excited about – exclusives get in the way of both. Of course, we understand that short promotional exclusives are common, we don’t have a total policy against them, and we certainly respect the choice of artists to decide what’s right for them,” Prince told Mashable in an email.

This exclusive deal comes just a week after artist Kanye West and Tidal were sued for allegedly deceiving fans into subscribing to the streaming music service to get exclusive access to West’s new album The Life of Pablo, reported Pitchfork. When West originally released the album in February, he said it would be available exclusively on Tidal, but he released the album to other streaming services on March 31.

Insider Take:

As the streaming music market shakes out, services like Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music and Tidal will have to differentiate themselves by factors other than price to garner market share and to attract and retain subscribers. It seems perfectly reasonable to expect that they will do so by offering exclusive content which may be album or artist specific.

Rather than publicly pouting about such arrangements, Spotify would be better served to put its time and energy into differentiating itself by developing its own exclusive offerings (e.g., platform features, artist, album, etc.) and stepping up its marketing game to attract and retain subscribers. Rather than bashing Tidal for what seems to be a great marketing move, Spotify can use this opportunity to see what it needs to do differently.

~ Dana E. Neuts, Subscription Insider