Apple Music Brings Back Artist Exclusives

Apple Music is finding artists to sign for artist exclusives again. They just partnered with one of Russia’s biggest independent rappers, Scriptonite, for an album release.

Scriptonite’s album is called Svistki & Bumashki (Papers and Whistles), and it will be exclusively on Apple Music for 4 weeks.

Scriptonite is a producer and rapper from Kazakhstan and is currently one of the biggest independent artists in Russia. 

Since 2019, Scriptonite has released music under his own label, Musica 36. The CEO of that label is Olzhas Baimagambetov. 

When asked about the exclusive with Apple Music, Baimagambetov said, “There have been a lot of people who tried to talk me out of it, but considering the market share of Apple Music, and also taking into account the mutual effort – this has been a great story so far.”

“Every year we conduct a business review with [our] aggregator Believe. We have seen in our reports that by far the biggest share of the money came from Apple Music in CIS.”

If this release turns out to be successful for Apple Music, we may be seeing a lot more exclusives coming from the platform.