Streaming transformed both the film and music industries, but the two have evolved very differently. Both film and music streamers offer vast libraries on demand and use subscription models (often with ad-supported tiers), delivering entertainment across devices. However, a closer look reveals divergent strategies: film/TV platforms fiercely guard exclusive content to stand out, while music platforms mostly carry the same catalog everywhere.
This fundamental split traces back to each medium’s history and business economics, and it shapes how content is paid for and what consumers experience.
Video Platforms vs. All-Music Access
One striking difference is content exclusivity. In video streaming, proprietary content is the norm, think of The Mandalorian only on Disney+, or Ted Lasso only on Apple TV+.
Most movies or series on Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, etc. are unavailable on rival services (aside from paying per title via rental stores). By contrast, in music streaming, virtually all popular songs can be found on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and other services simultaneously.
As a result, a film fan might juggle multiple subscriptions to catch different hit shows, whereas a music fan can hear almost any hit song on the app of their choice.
Why this split? The answer lies in industry tradition and consumer behavior. Historically, film and TV content was always siloed, a movie debuted exclusively in theaters, then later on a specific premium channel or network under carefully timed “windowing” schedules.
TV networks likewise produced or licensed shows for their channel alone (e.g. you could only watch Friends on NBC during its original run). Consumers grew accustomed to hunting for specific content on specific channels or paying per view.
Music, however, followed a distribution-maximizing model: record labels never built exclusive record stores; they sold music to every retailer and got radio stations everywhere to play their artists. In other words, success in music came from being as ubiquitous as possible, whereas success in video often came from exclusivity and unique offerings.
These legacies carried into streaming. Music streamers launched as all-in-one jukeboxes, inheriting the expectation (from the iTunes era and CDs) that one library should contain millions of songs across all labels. Users came to believe that paying a $10 monthly music subscription meant access to every artist, that was the original promise of streaming. As a result, attempts at platform-exclusive music have largely failed. When a few superstar artists (Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Kanye West, etc.) tried to release albums only on one service, fans didn’t flock to sign up for a new subscription, they either waited until the album went wide or simply pirated it.
As one industry commentator put it, music services all have “99% of the same content,” so it’s “not really worth it to pay another $9.99 a month for a few albums.” Fans feel cheated by exclusives and often respond by seeking the music elsewhere (often illegally), hurting the artist’s earnings and goodwill.
This backlash led the biggest music labels to actively outlaw exclusive streaming deals in recent years, prioritizing wide reach over short-term platform payoffs. (Notably, in China a single company (Tencent) did lock in exclusive rights to much of the music catalog, but regulators stepped in to ban that practice as anti-competitive, underscoring how unusual exclusivity is in the music space.)
Video streaming services, on the other hand, bet on exclusivity as their competitive edge from day one. Netflix pioneered with original series you could only get on Netflix, and newcomers like Disney+, HBO Max, and Apple TV+ followed by pulling their proprietary content off others’ shelves to build walled gardens of exclusive shows.
This strategy created FOMO, consumers subscribed because they “had to” see that one buzzy show everyone was talking about. Unlike music, a single hit series (Game of Thrones on HBO, Stranger Things on Netflix, etc.) can convince people to pay for another video service, a two-hour movie or a multi-episode series is a unique, substantial experience that some viewers will chase. (As one observer wryly noted, you’d never buy a theater ticket just to hear a 3-minute song, but you might for a 2-hour movie.
Similarly, people cancel or add video services based on a few exclusive shows, whereas no one adds a music service just for one artist’s album in the long run.)
Exclusivity in video is also driven by who creates the content. Unlike Spotify or Apple Music, which don’t finance the recording of most songs, film streamers often fund production of originals or pay hefty sums for exclusive licensing rights. That investment model practically requires exclusivity, if Disney+ is paying to produce a Marvel TV series, it isn’t about to license it out to Netflix, because the whole point is to use that exclusive content to attract and keep subscribers.
In short, video platforms differentiate by what content they have that others don’t, while music platforms differentiate by how they deliver essentially the same content (through playlists, personalization, app features, etc., instead of unique song catalogs).
Royalties vs. Licensing Deals
Under the hood, film and music streamers also pay content creators very differently, which reinforces the above approaches. Music streaming operates on a royalty model: services like Spotify pay rights-holders (labels, artists, publishers) roughly proportional to each song’s streams.
On average about 70% of a music streamer’s revenue is paid out in royalties to rights-holders. Every time you play a song, the owner of that recording gets a tiny fraction of a penny. In aggregate, if a song racks up millions of plays across Spotify, Apple, Amazon, etc., those services funnel a share of their subscription and ad revenue back to the music’s owners. Crucially, these payments scale with popularity, the more people listen, the more the label/artist earns. This gives record labels a strong incentive to put their music on all platforms to maximize total streams. It also leaves music services with high variable costs: as their subscriber base and listening hours grow, the absolute amount they pay out in royalties grows in tandem, keeping profit margins slim.
Spotify, for instance, can’t reduce its biggest cost (royalties) without renegotiating with the powerful major labels that control most popular music.
Video streaming deals look almost the opposite. Rather than paying content owners per view, film/TV streamers generally license content for fixed fees or produce it outright. If Netflix wants a popular TV series on its platform, it negotiates a licensing agreement (say, tens of millions of dollars to stream that series for a couple of years), a cost that is fixed regardless of whether 10,000 people watch it or 10 million do.
Similarly, when Netflix spends an estimated $17 billion per year on producing original shows and movies, those are upfront investments to own or exclusively control that content. The important difference is that a video platform’s content costs are more fixed and deliberate: they buy or fund a slate of titles, and those costs don’t automatically rise if viewership rises.
In fact, a platform hopes a single hit it paid for will be watched by every subscriber (or attract new ones) at no extra cost per view, that’s how owning exclusive content can eventually yield higher margins than constantly paying outsiders for every stream. Over time, Netflix’s strategy is to amortize big content investments across a growing subscriber base, whereas Spotify’s strategy is constrained by paying for each stream out of each month’s revenue.
These payment models shape creator incentives too. A musician earns fractions of a cent per play, which means to make real money on Spotify or YouTube Music, a song must accumulate huge numbers of streams (and even then, many artists complain the payouts are meager). But that musician’s work is effectively in a global content pool, available everywhere, so at least in theory they can reach the widest audience to maximize those plays.
A filmmaker or TV producer, by contrast, might get a big one-time check by selling a show’s exclusive rights to a platform like Amazon Prime Video or Netflix. The trade-off is that the show then lives behind one service’s wall, potentially limiting its audience, but the creators and studios have already been paid via the licensing deal. For example, when Netflix paid $100+ million to stream Friends exclusively for a year, the studio received that money upfront, it didn’t matter how many fans actually rewatched Friends on Netflix, except insofar as Netflix used the show’s presence to retain subscribers.
From the creator’s perspective, music streaming revenue is usage-based and ongoing, whereas video streaming revenue is often license-based or fixed per contract (with some exceptions like backend deals or residuals, which, even then, function very differently from song royalties). One practical upshot: the music industry’s dependence on per-stream royalties makes it “a fixed-sized pie” split among all tracks, motivating labels to push songs everywhere for volume, while film studios calculate the best window or platform for a chunk of revenue at each stage.
Convergence on the Horizon?
Given these contrasts, one might wonder if the two industries will eventually borrow each other’s playbooks. Interestingly, we’re seeing signs of convergence. On the video side, the all-out exclusivity wars of the early streaming era are beginning to soften. Now that the major studios have their streaming platforms established, they’ve started to realize that keeping every single asset locked up might be leaving money on the table.
In 2023, several high-profile shows previously tied to one service were licensed out to others, effectively adopting a cross-platform approach long common in music. For instance, Warner Bros. Discovery made headlines by licensing some HBO programs to Netflix (after initially insisting they’d live only on HBO Max), and NBCUniversal’s hit series Suits was licensed to Netflix where it promptly became the year’s most-streamed show in the U.S., even as it also remained available on NBC’s own Peacock service.
In fact, one analysis found the number of TV seasons being cross-licensed between major platforms roughly tripled in 2023, marking a return toward the old syndication model in new form. As Warner’s CEO David Zaslav explained, licensing some library content more widely is “just smart business,” it expands the audience and provides additional revenue streams from a piece of content that had plateaued under one roof. In a world where growth has slowed, video streamers are now chasing profitability, and that means being less precious about exclusivity when a broader distribution deal can “maximize the value of the asset” and bring in cash.
In short, the “new era” of streaming may see fewer rigid walls: select shows and movies could rotate or be shared across multiple services, more closely mirroring how essentially all music is available on all platforms.
Meanwhile, music streamers have been exploring differentiation strategies beyond the open catalog, in some cases, even dabbling in exclusivity in other content forms. For example, Spotify spent heavily to secure exclusive rights to popular podcasts (like The Joe Rogan Experience and Armchair Expert), aiming to draw users into its ecosystem with content not found elsewhere.
However, even this approach has partially reversed: Spotify recently allowed some of these once-exclusive podcasts to distribute on other platforms, realizing that abandoning exclusivity can boost reach and ad revenue for the content. This mirrors the realization in video that more eyeballs can trump exclusivity for older content.
By and large, the core music catalog is likely to remain non-exclusive, neither artists, labels, nor consumers have appetite to fragment music access again after the hard lessons of the mid-2010s. Instead, music services will continue to mimic video platforms in softer ways: producing their own original content around the music (documentaries, video clips, live sessions), hosting exclusive interviews or radio-style shows (e.g. Apple Music’s Beats 1 radio or Spotify’s artist audio shows), and using personalized user experience as their selling point rather than locking up the songs themselves.
On the flip side, video providers might inch closer to the music model by bundling offerings or collaborating. We’re already seeing early moves: some companies have discussed bundling streaming services together or co-owning joint platforms, much like a music subscription gives access to multiple labels’ output under one price. A recent example is a planned joint streaming venture for sports content co-owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, Fox, and Disney’s ESPN, essentially pooling valuable programming that used to be siloed. Such collaborations suggest that down the road, consumers could get something closer to an “all-in-one” feel for certain video content (at least within genres like sports) instead of needing separate apps for each network.
While it’s unlikely we’ll ever have a single “Spotify for movies” with every film on earth (the economics of big-budget movies and the studios’ identities make that tricky), the trend of licensed sharing and bundles implies the video industry might gravitate toward a middle ground, exclusivity for brand-new blockbusters or marquee originals, but broader distribution for older library titles to supplement revenue (just as in music, new album releases are sometimes timed exclusives or windowed, but eventually everything becomes widely available).
Our Final Take
In the end, the film/TV streaming and music streaming industries are products of their distinct histories and incentives. Films and series need exclusivity to recoup massive investments and to brand each platform with a unique identity, whereas music thrives on ubiquity and convenience, with platforms competing on experience rather than catalog.
Their payment structures reflect this split: music streaming is a volume game of micro-royalties and thus demands the widest reach, while video streaming is a high-stakes content licensing game that treats shows and movies as exclusive assets, at least until it’s time to squeeze more value out of them elsewhere.
Yet, as both sectors mature, they are learning from each other. The music side has realized that exclusive content can backfire unless it genuinely adds value for the user, leading to a focus on features and formats beyond just songs. The video side is realizing that perpetual exclusivity has limits, once subscriber growth slows, selling your hit show’s reruns to a rival isn’t heresy, it’s just good business.
Consumers, for their part, are voicing fatigue with too many subscriptions, not unlike how music fans rebelled against album exclusives. Over time, we’re likely to see a bit more flexibility in video and a continued commitment to openness in music, inching the two models slightly closer. The Holy Grail would be the convenience of music streaming combined with the richness of video content. In other words, an ecosystem where a viewer/listener can find anything they want easily, and creators still get paid fairly. We’re not there yet, but the industry’s recent moves toward collaboration and cross-platform availability hint that the gap between Netflix’s world and Spotify’s world might slowly be narrowing.
Ultimately, film and music streaming will probably never be identical twins, but they may become closer cousins, borrowing each other’s best practices so that exclusivity in video becomes more judicious, and availability in music remains as broad as possible. For now, your favorite show might still be locked behind its home platform while your favorite song plays everywhere, and that comes down to the decades of business strategy and consumer expectations that shaped these two entertainment realms.
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