Apple Inc.’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) streaming service, Apple Music, just managed to bag an exclusive deal with popular music label, Cash Money Records. Speculation confirms that Cash Money and Apple will work together in the subsequent future to roll out a documentary. According to Mac Rumors, this is the first time that the service has partnered up with an entire record label instead of individual artists.
Rapper and co-founder of Cash Money, Birdman, met up with Apple Music’s head of content, Larry Jackson to finalize details for the “power move.” Birdman and Mr. Jackson took the opportunity to confirm the news themselves on Instagram. The two men successfully utilized the power of social media to trigger anticipation amongst audiences after they uploaded a picture together.
The tech giant’s decision to call dibs on Cash Money is no surprise to viewers considering that Apple has been known to sign exclusive deals with artists in the past. Apple Music’s debut in 2015 added it to the long list of existing streaming services. Through such deals, it hopes to rise as the dominant music platform which offers exclusive access to never-before-seen and heard content.
The streaming service has worked hard to offer exclusive perks to its 15 million subscribers. This helps Apple Music develop an edge over its rivals and also works as a great marketing push for the service. Previously, Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift and Drake have been some of the few artists that have agreed to make exclusive debuts of their content on the streaming platform. While such deals have helped boost Apple Music’s popularity, the appearance of Taylor Swift in a bunch of Apple Music TV promos has also done the trick.
Since Cash Money represents Drake, it was probably inevitable that the music platform would eventually secure some form of partnership with the famous record label. After Apple Music scored exclusive rights to Drake’s latest album, Views, for almost two weeks, the artist also appeared at the company’s well known Worldwide Developers Conference and on Apple’s Music’s Beats 1 radio service. On these occasions, Apple Music successfully managed to capture the attention of Drake-fans around the world, highlighting its clever promotional strategy.
We believe Cash Money’s addition will definitely help Apple Music score points with music-fans whilst also increasing chances of some of the label’s other artists, including Nicki Minaj, Lil Wayne, Tyga and Young Money signing similar deals in the future. The label has also worked with other famous artists in the past, including Dj Khaled and Busta Rhymes.
Apple Music’s countless efforts to ramp up on the number of exclusive offerings are mainly triggered by the threat from its streaming rival, Spotify. The latter operates as the dominant streaming service in competitive markets with a user base of 30 million subscribers. Spotify also has an additional 70 million users accessing its “freemium” tier, a great set up offered by the service to attract more users.
While the service may not be able to directly compete with Spotify, it will still help Apple Music tackle other streaming rivals such as Google Play Music, Tidal, Pandora and more. Even though Cash Money has been the center of controversy in the past, after Lil Wayne accused Birdman for not being punctual with payments and limiting artists from exercising creativity, it still remains one of the top record labels in the market.
Since the platform previously worked with Drake on his music video, there are high chances that it has plans to launch more innovative Apple Music produced videos. Even though no clues regarding the documentary’s content have been given, we believe that the partnership also paves the way for Apple Music and Cash Money to produce exclusive video content for the former in the subsequent future.
However, no details regarding the deal have been disclosed yet. It is unclear whether the streaming service will unveil exclusive content from the record label in the future or if it will solely focus on airing the future documentary.