Why video streaming platforms “fight for exclusive content” while music streaming platforms provide almost the same content ?
If I want to watch a marvel movie I need a subscription to disney+, if I want to watch the boys it’s on prime video, if it’s sex education it’s on netflix.
I’m willing to pay 50€/month for a service that provides everything but that doesn’t exist… (I know I can subscribe to almost everything at this price, but there’s too much trouble switching between apps to find a specific movie). So the question is “why it is this way for video and the other way for music ?”
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Because the likes of Disney took a look at the success of Netflix and decided they could make more money by selling their own streaming service rather than selling rights to their movies on someone else’s.
It’s just the way things are. Video companies are willing to pay a premium to video owners to have their content on their platform. Meanwhile, partly due to the absolutely massive volume of people producing music, and to try drumming up future album sales, music companies often distribute songs rather freely, with a system of “pay us royalties every time you play this song.”
So video gets their money upfront. Music is pay-as-you-go. Video also costs a lot more to produce than a song, which is why they tend to want money upfront, and offering exclusive rights increases the value of having that video available if it’s a popular show/movie.
When online music distribution came along the music industry were kind of taken off guard. They were first fighting it but when this failed they had to scramble to get some value out of it and were kind of forced to work together with the already established services. However when video streaming became popular it was a different story. The movie industry were able to negotiate contracts early on which limited Netflix’s distribution rights. Part of this reason was that the movie industry already have contracts in place for TV networks and video rentals which could also be used for video distribution networks whereas the music industry were purely focused on sales. And part of this was that the movie industry had seen what happened in the music industry and had taken notes, some of the big companies were both movie producers and music producers so they had intimate knowledge of how to get screwed over by streaming services. So the movie producers were able to launch their own online video distribution networks and made both their old and new content exclusive to these. This meant that Netflix and Amazon which had relied on being able to use content from the big movie producers were not left having to buy content from smaller studios or make their own content.
There is also several other differences that contributed to this. People tend to consume music very differently then movies and series. You generally tend to just put a playlist on random shuffle and leave it there for days on end while you would generally only see a movie once. So when a music producer and a streaming service does not come to an agreement the songs from that producer just disappears from the users playlist and are generally not really missed all that much. People do not sign up to a competing music streaming service for things like this and generally do not have accounts at multiple services. However this is not the case for movies. If a movie is unavailable on one service people actively order the service where it is available to watch it there or they end up going to the cinema to see it. If a studio does not grant a streaming service the right to stream their movie then people will still end up paying for the movie in some other way. Whereas if a music producer does not grant a streaming service the right to stream their music then users just end up not listening to that music.
Because Apple Music and Spotify have so solidified themselves as market leaders that you might as well not exist if you’re not on those platforms.
And because recording is only part of their revenue. The other, and larger, source of revenue is live concerts which is where most artists make the real money from ticket sales and merchandise.
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