Apple Music is the best streaming service because of its high profile and exclusive releases

The argument

Setting Apple Music apart from other streaming services is its exclusive content. Artists have signed exclusive deals with Apple to release their content on their platform, before anywhere else, and that arrangement gives subscribers something no rival can match at the same moment: not a different way of listening, but earlier access to the same music. Those deals also feed the size of the catalogue. They contribute to Apple having the largest music library of all streaming sites, with over 60 million songs (compared to 50 million from Amazon and Spotify). Some of Apple's exclusives include Jay-Z, Taylor Swift, Britney Spears, and Frank Ocean, among others. These exclusive deals make Apple Music's library the most extensive in the industry, offering a wider range of artists than competing services and granting early access to its subscribers — so the catalogue advantage and the exclusivity advantage are not two separate claims but one, since it is the deals that produce the breadth. Recently, Apple Music has also adopted the strategy of signing exclusive deals with up-and-coming artists rather than only established ones. For example, only Apple subscribers will have listening access to several songs by French rap duo PNL, before the songs eventually become available on other streaming platforms. The exclusivity in cases like that one is temporary rather than permanent, which proponents argue is precisely the point: the material reaches everyone in the end, so nobody is deprived of it, but this allows Apple Music users to be the first to experience new music. That is an advantage which other streaming services do not offer, and on this account it is what makes Apple Music the best of them.

Premises

Counter-arguments

By making some content exclusive to Apple users, the platform may actually be driving piracy in the music streaming world. People are faced with the choice of buying the album outright or finding an illegal version online. Artists often enter these exclusivity deals for the extra money from the deal, but in the long term, artists risk losing money to illegal downloads. The use of exclusives has been condemned by various artists too. Lady Gaga has been a vocal opponent to exclusives, saying in 2016: “I told my label that if they signed those contracts with Apple Music and Tidal, I’d leak all my own new music." Exclusives are seen as a way for the artist and the service they sign with to make more money at the customer's expense. Exclusives limit and alienate parts of the artist's audience, creating long term damage to the artist themselves.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The standard is stipulated rather than argued. Listeners also weigh price, recommendation quality, playlists and social features, audio quality, device support and what is licensed in their own country — and a windowed release that withholds music from most listeners is a cost on the very measure the premise counts as a benefit. [Rejecting P2] Catalogue figures of this kind converge, because the major services license from the same rights holders, and the gap cited has since closed. Exclusivity was also short-lived as a strategy: the releases named became available elsewhere, and artists including Lady Gaga opposed the practice publicly on the grounds that it splits an audience and pushes listeners toward unlicensed copies.