How long ago it seems. Back in 2016, the digital music battle lines were being drawn around album exclusives on streaming services. Tidal went heavy with Beyoncé’s Lemonade (it’s still a streaming exclusive there) while Apple Music opened its chequebook for everyone from Drake and Britney Spears to Future and Frank Ocean (although Ocean sold them something of a pup with the visual album Endless by putting out Blonde – which many saw as the “proper” album – a few days later).
Meanwhile Spotify argued that exclusives were anti-consumer and labels (and most artists) eventually came round to their way of thinking. Now the album exclusives battle is over, the scramble is over the content around albums rather than the albums themselves. Each DSP wants something unique – an interview, a track-by-track dissection of the album, a fans-first secret gig – but the long-form exclusive has not gone away like the album exclusive has.
The early stirrings were there in late 2015 when Apple got the exclusive on Taylor Swift’s 1989 tour film. Apple has pulled a similar rabbit out of a similar hat with Songwriter: Ed Sheeran, a documentary about the titular singer and, by some distance, the biggest pop star on the planet.
It is sold as “an intimate and personal look into the writing process” behind Sheeran’s chart-dominating Divide album, drawing on home video footage from Sheeran that shows its creation and recording. If you want an album that has truly captured the public’s imagination in the past year, it is either going to have to be Divide or The Greatest Showman soundtrack.
Songwriter is filmed by Murray Cummings, who just happens to be Sheeran’s cousin, so he has unparalleled access to be able to document songs going from jams to the final recording. It’s really capturing the calm before the storm and, even if you are ambivalent about Sheeran’s music, it’s fascinating to see the making of a blockbuster album while it is still a blockbuster rather than 20 years later.
As acts have the technology and the teams alongside them to easily record everything around them – and as prescient labels like Atlantic, with the appointment of Tom Mullen as its VP of catalogue marketing, start to take charge of this exact process – this approach will become part of major album campaigns as they happen rather than coming later as anniversary pieces. The past, it seems, is now.
