Jay Z continues to make business moves in the digital music industry. Just last week the hip-hop mogul made some bold business moves, because he owns his own publishing he pulled his Blueprint trilogy of albums off of all the major streaming and digital music services including Spotify, Apple AAPL Music and iTunes, Amazon, and Google Play, with the notable exception of the one he owns, TIDAL. At the end of 2014, Jay Z gained back the rights to all the music he made while on Def Jam, so he
This comes after Jay Z had already pulled his 1996 debut album Reasonable Doubt off of other digital services last year. As of this writing, none of the four albums are even available for purchase on iTunes or digitally on Amazon.
Kanye West is a co-owner of TIDAL, with a reported 3% stake solely released his new album The Life of Pablo on TIDAL.
All of this activity comes just as Sony CEO Michael Lynton publicly attacked Spotify’s business model of having both paid and free accounts. He pushed for a so-called “windowing” strategy, where paid subscribers would have access to new music for a period of time before free accounts could hear it – a strategy already being used by Drake, who grants a one-week exclusive period to Apple Music before releasing new music to other services.
