Jay-Z, for example, made that a core reason to subscribe to Tidal. Apple Music had its own special drops, including Frank Ocean‘s Endless, the visual album he used as a smart tool to quickly fulfill his label contract before dropping the self-released Blonde, also on Apple Music, one day later. Related Apple Music Introduces Tagging for AI Songs, Its First Regulation on AI Use Tory Lanez Sues California Prison System for $100M Over Stabbing by Inmate D4vd Arrested for Alleged Murder of Celeste Rivas, Months After Body Found in Singer's Car After that, however, exclusive drops have largely ceased to exist, forcing top competitors like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and others to search for new differentiating factors.

Spotify, for example, bolstered its service with valuable other offerings, like podcasts and audiobooks. It also launched a number of shareable music discovery concepts like Daylist, Wrapped and AI DJ. Apple Music expanded radio shows from personalities, like Zane Lowe.

It also leaned into its standing as one of the world’s biggest technology and hardware companies to create features, like Spatial Audio, that encourages both a high quality streaming experience and a reason to try their myriad of headphone offerings. Still, it remains a never-ending challenge for music streamers to find ways to stand out from the pack. On this week’s episode of Billboard’s On the Record podcast, vp of Apple Music, Apple TV+, Sports and Beats Oliver Schusser joins to talk about why he thinks Apple Music is unlike any other service.

Watch or listen to the full episode of On the Record below on YouTube, or check it out on other podcast platforms here. I want to talk about exclusives. That was once a differentiating factor in streaming, but it isn’t anymore — which is so fascinating to me.

Back in the day Jay-Z was doing a lot of that with Tidal. Apple Music released Frank Ocean’s Endless visual album, and then 24 hours later he followed up with Blonde also on Apple Music — Yes, the labels decided not to do exclusives anymore. The reason why I regret that, by the way, is because I think there’s a real danger that an album released these days isn’t as special anymore as it used to be.

And you have a few artists like Taylor Swift or Harry Styles who can make it special because of who they are. But in general, I think the Friday new release day doesn’t really have the same magic [as] a new release day, I don’t know, 10 or 20 years ago. And I do actually think that when [streaming services] have something exclusively, they go the extra mile to shout from the rooftop on that particular release.

But it is what it is. I can’t change it. There are a lot of things I don’t like in the industry that I can’t really change.

So, what’s another thing in the music industry that you don’t like? I’m sure you’ve heard me say this: I think “free” was a terrible idea. Apple Music is the only service that doesn’t have a free tier, and believe it or not, we are really proud of that.

I do imagine that is tough for customer acquisition, especially in certain markets where there’s not a lot of consumer buying power, but tell me about your philosophy behind that. First of all, we really look at music like art… We think when an artist spends nine months in a studio to make a piece of [incredible] work, no one in the world should think it’s okay to give that away for free. And if you look at — I don’t know if you watched [Severance], which was like, at the beginning of the year, the biggest and hottest TV show on the planet — the only way to watch [Severance] was, you have to sign up for Apple TV+.

I mean, we have a free trial, so you can binge it in the first week, technically. But you can’t just go anywhere on the internet and consume all the shows for free. The same story, by the way, could apply to any Netflix or any Disney show.

I think it’s not the right thing for songwriters and artists to just say, you know what, we’re going to give this away for free — especially with the very little monetization that artists and songwriters are going to get in return. In case there’s someone listening who doesn’t understand this — for free tiers, it’s really an ad-supported tier actually. They do have royalty rates, but those rates are just much lower.

Yes, and it’s widely reported what the revenues are in that model. I think that’s the first problem. The second problem is more of a business problem, in my view: the fact that all paid services have to compete with free means, at the end of the day, not enough people are paying, because they can get it for free, and the paid services can’t actually charge the correct price for the service because they’re always competing with free… Why do so many more people subscribe to a video streaming service than to a music streaming service?… Because you can’t ge