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Frank Ocean, and an ocean of streaming music

When Frank Ocean surprised the music world last weekend by releasing not one, but two albums in the space of two days, it came off as a generous demonstration of productivity to fans who had waited impatiently for four years for a follow-up to 2012's Channel Orange.

When Frank Ocean surprised the music world last weekend by releasing not one, but two albums in the space of two days, it came off as a generous demonstration of productivity to fans who had waited impatiently for four years for a follow-up to 2012's Channel Orange.

It was also a little sneaky, and the latest shot fired between warring music-streaming services as well as a demonstration of how those online services are threatening to make traditional record labels obsolete.

Here's how. Both of Ocean's new releases - the 45-minute "visual album" Endless and the 75-minute more fully realized Blonde - are Apple Music exclusives. You can't get them on dominant streamer Spotify.

Nor on Tidal, Jay Z's upstart competitor, which will, of course, be the ubiquitous brand at the Jay Z-curated Budweiser Made in America festival on Saturday and Sunday on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Headliners Rihanna and Coldplay are artist stakeholders in Tidal, and Rihanna is one of several superstars who have released albums that were initially (legally) available only on Tidal.

Endless and Blonde are vastly different works: The first, which prominently features Philadelphia acts Jazmine Sullivan and Alex G, is an amorphous song cycle that can be listened to only while also watching a 45-minute black-and-white film of Ocean building a spiral staircase by hand. It's difficult, to say the least. The second is more accessible and much better and can be streamed or purchased at the iTunes store.

There's also another difference: Endless was released as streaming-only on Apple via the Def Jam/Universal label, fulfilling Ocean's one remaining album on his contract with the company, according to Billboard. Later in the weekend, Blonde came out on Ocean's own label, Boys Don't Cry.

Under the first deal, Ocean can expect 14 percent of total revenue generated by Apple streams. With the second, he gets 70 percent from streams and sales. So that makes the two albums in one weekend seem less like a magnanimous gesture, and more like the Machiavellian move of an artist aiming to get out of his recording contract.

Naturally, Universal isn't happy. Chairman Lucian Grainge has reportedly decided the company will no longer allow artists to do exclusive streams. Time will tell whether other labels follow suit.

Why does this matter to music lovers? Because the streaming-business wars have turned the promise of a celestial jukebox with all the world's music at your fingertips into a lie, or at least an annoyingly expensive proposition with cloud-based sounds controlled by competing corporate interests.

Is that good for fans? No, unless you're the rare subscriber to more than one service. Is it good for artists? Sure, if the marquee names get a big payout from a superrich company like Apple, as was undoubtedly the case with Ocean, and Drake, who put out his blockbuster Views initially through Apple-only this year.

And Chance the Rapper, another highlight of the Made in America lineup, self-released his stunner of a mixtape/album, Coloring Book, via Apple. So if you can cut a deal with the largest company in the world, who needs a record label?

Aligning with only one service potentially does a disservice to artists, though, by limiting their reach. Like Howard Stern getting superrich working for subscriber-only Sirius XM or Bill Simmons going from basic cable to premium cable HBO with Any Given Wednesday - has anyone watched that show? - acts that choose sides risk cutting themselves off from the cultural conversation.

Of course, you could argue that anyone who really wants to hear the Frank Ocean album is going to get it, whether they have Apple Music or not. Apple has only 15 million subscribers, all of whom pay at least $9.99 a month, compared to Spotify, which has 39 million paid and more than 100 million total subscribers, including ad-based "freemium" users. The much-smaller Tidal, which has reportedly been in talks to sell to Apple, has 4 million.

So how do fans hear Frank Ocean if they don't have Apple Music? Eventually, the album will likely be available on all services.

But in the meantime, they'll steal it.

When Kanye West's The Life of Pablo was streaming on Tidal-only this year, the service's subscriptions more than doubled, according to Digital Music News, but there was also rampant online piracy. Troy Carter, the West Philadelphia native and former Lady Gaga manager who's now an executive at Spotify, argues in Billboard that limiting access motivates people to steal. "Exclusives are bad for artists, bad for consumers, and bad for the whole industry," he says.

The streaming wars aren't being fought only with artist exclusives. Playlists are probably a more important weapon. That's one reason Pandora, the randomized internet radio service (which pays more minuscule royalty rates than its competitors) announced this week it was bringing on the Roots' Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson as its first music ambassador.

The drummer's three-hour Questlove Supreme show will debut Sept. 7. In a note posted on Instagram, he hearkened to radio days, "when tastemakers built their rep off trust and music knowledge" and 1970s Philadelphia DJs on WDAS-FM such as Dr. Perri Johnson, Doug Henderson, and Mimi Brown gave him a "massive edumucation course."

There's a sampling of the show available now with Maya Rudolph as a guest, and the music is expertly curated and programmed. Whether it can help Pandora's reputation among artists is an open question. (Songwriter Jason Isbell tweeted "Hey @questlove maybe get them to up the checks.") But it uses branded artist starpower to compete with Spotify and Apple Music, whose Beats 1 radio station has employed celeb DJs like Drake, Elton John, and Annie Clark of St. Vincent.

All of this strategizing is an attempt to grapple with the essential challenge of the information-overload age: With so much out there, what do you choose to listen to? Apple has tried to cut into Spotify's lead by doing deals with big stars but also by presenting consumers with a wide range of curated-by-humans playlists. The clutter can be confusing, though, and a redesign of the service, which launched last year, is on the way.

Spotify's response has been to understand that the effort entailed in picking what to play can be wearying. Its big success story in the last year is the Discovery Playlist, a personalized collection of 30 songs delivered to each listener's inbox every Monday. It's made by selecting tunes from user-generated playlists that contain songs and artists you've listened to already, and betting you'll like music liked by people who like the same music you do.

I'm not going to say the Discovery Playlist is foolproof, but it's appealingly simple and surprising. I was quite pleased with this week's selection of songs that I did and didn't know from Captain Beefheart, Brendan Benson, Cam & China, Lijadu Sisters, and the Beatles. It helped me navigate the ocean of music before me, even if I didn't have the option to listen to Frank Ocean.