Why Exclusives Are Terrible for Fans, Artists, and the Streaming Music Business
The main problem with carrying this over into the digital age is that the whole consumption model is totally different.
Fans are no longer asked to go to another store to make a discreet purchase, but rather to sign up for an entirely new and much more expensive service that offers almost exactly the same thing as every other service.
While streaming TV and film sites like Netflix and Hulu offer enough different content to make two subscriptions potentially worthwhile, the music streaming services each have 99% of the same content — and it’s not really worth it to pay another $9.99 a month for a few albums.
So the fans simply go off and download the albums from torrent sites, or wait until the artist eventually caves and releases it wide. Artists, meanwhile, lose money on the illegal downloads. What’s more, they lose fan goodwill.
Source: Music Business Worldwide