Drake has announced the official release date of his new album titled ‘Views From the 6’.

The album will be first released as an Apple Music exclusive and will be available as of April 29th. The news was verified by Apple on Beats 1’s OVO Sound Radio.

Since the launch of Apple Music last year, Drake has always been a keen advocate of the streaming platform. The Canadian Singer/Rapper was present at Apple Music’s launch in San Francisco last year, and his hit song Hotline Bling was first released on Apple Music before any other streaming service.

Also, Drake’s OVO Sound radio show is an Apple Music exclusive, and currently only available on Apple’s Beats 1 radio station. On top of this, last month DVSN – a Canadian R&B duo signed to Drake’s OVO Sound label released their album exclusively on Apple Music.

It’s obvious that Drake has a strong relationship with the streaming platform.

But what effect is this going to have on the other streaming services in the market?

Streaming exclusive content is a major strategy that most major streaming platforms are using as a way to increase subscriber numbers. Tidal is famous for this and have reportedly doubled their subscriber numbers as a result of exclusively streaming Kanye West’s ‘The Life Of Pablo’ album.

Apple Music has already grown considerably since its launch last year – In nine months it has racked up 11 million paying subscribers. With this new Drake exclusive it is widely anticipated that the streaming platform will gain a considerable amount more. Apple Music is the closest streaming service to Spotify in terms of subscriber numbers.

Although Spotify has a recorded 30 million paying users which is roughly 30% more than that of Apple Music they will still be keeping a very close eye on Apple Music’s growth and will be implementing strategies of their own to widen the gap. In fact. this may be the reason why Spotify has just recent raised a massive $1 billion in debt financing.

(Image by thecomeupshow, Creative Commons, Attribution 2.0 Generic)

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