We’ve been ears to the ground, noses in the air, to stay close to story of Jay-Z’s new, premium music streaming service Tidal. Since launching in late March, the mega-star-backed rival to Spotify has had its fair share of drama and is making waves for both right and wrong reasons. While we wait eagerly for stats showing consumer uptake of Tidal, let’s recap on the latest news for the fledgling music service.
A music service by artists, for artists?
The main gripe with Tidal, as we know, was the circle-jerk of multi-millionaire artists (such as ‘Yonce, Jack White, Daft Punk and Alicia Keys) pleading with us on-stage to re-instate rightful reward for recording artists by shelling out a little more of our hard-earned dosh each month, for (momentarily) exclusive content and hi-def, ‘lossless’ audio. For pretty much everyone, it left a bad taste in our mouths, with few managing to really engage with Jay-Z’s grand vision. Frontman Marcus Mumford from British folk band Mumford & Sons pushed back against the service, saying: “We wouldn’t have joined it anyway, even if they had asked. We don’t want to be tribal… when they say it’s artist-owned, it’s owned by those rich, wealthy artists.” Death Cab for Cutie singer Ben Gibbard and Lily Allen also shared their distaste for the service, with Allen tweeting: “My concern is that Tidal may set emerging artists back.”
Streamlining, leveraging, consolidating, firing… wait, what?
Sadly, Tidal’s problems don’t end with a bit of flack from other artists – with the recent news that Tidal sliced 25 of its employees in a move towards “streamlining resources to ensure talent is maximized to enhance the customer experience” (a vague piece of business wank-speak, which, being a Management Consultant, is lost even on me) and at the same time dropping CEO Andy Chen in the process. Former CEO Peter Tonstad has (albeit temporarily) stepped up to the plate, no doubt to position Tidal for the next wave of offerings for its clientele, and “change the status quo”.
Murmurs on the horizon for Apple’s rival service ready to challenge Spotify, Tidal
Apple gave a hint of its imminent challenge to Spotify and Tidal with its latest software release, where, embedded among the updates was a new music app with a new look. Turns out Tidal isn’t the only one trying to woo big-name artists, with Kanye West, Taylor Swift and Florence and the Machine rumoured to be in talks with Apple about possible partnerships.
Unique, digital customer experiences and initiatives to support indie artists
Despite its challenges, Tidal is continuing to push the boundaries, exploring new corners of the streaming world and engaging customers in unique ways, with exclusive, digital concerts (known as Tidal X, featuring the likes of Demi Lovato and J.Cole) and even calling subscribers to thank them. Perhaps best of all, Tidal are launching initiatives to support up-and-coming, indie artists, which is music to our ears. When recently interviewed, Tidal exec Vania Schlogel discussed two initiatives, Tidal Rising (“Tidal Rising is basically that human element of bringing forward indie and emerging artists and giving them visibility as they grow their fanbases.”) and Tidal Discovery (“a way for independent and emerging artists to upload their music directly and be seen and heard.”), with a view of giving creative control and distribution power back into the hands of the artists.
You have to hand it to Jay-Z – he’s giving it a good old college-try. And while I’m still not going to fork out for Tidal, I respect his disruptive moves and desire to create a new and better digital experience for users. Plus, anything that will support greater visibility and a recognition for indie musicians has my vote.
So, what do you think? Are you a Tidal-waver? (Sorry.) Are the exclusives really worth the hype? Do your ears feel silkier and sexier now you’re being treated to ‘lossless’ audio? Let us know.
Stay tuned and we’ll keep you up to date as the Tidal-wave unfolds.
If you don’t know what TIDAL is, we’ve got all the details here.
We recently discovered just how invested Jay Z is in the streaming service. In a Q&A at NYU/Tisch School’s Clive Davis Instititue of Record Music, Jay answered a number of questions from students asked by faced Professor Errol Kolosine. Among these questions was one on whether major labels would be restricted from using the service. Jay said that they couldn’t do that, especially considering the nature of contracts. “If you don’t have a contract as an independent artist, then you can do whatever you want and we would love to work with you.”
The follow-up question on whether an artist could use TIDAL instead of a contract is what prompted the discovery that Jay longer has a record deal and suggests that all of his future music will be released on the service. “I’m on TIDAL. I don’t have a record deal. So, yes.”
What smaller independent artists will gain from the service is still an an outstanding question. TIDAL executive Vania Schlogel, who was also present at the Q&A, gave a very vague answer. “We’re still a very young, nascent company and we have a lot of initiatives that we’re working on, especially when it comes to indie talent, emerging talent, giving people visibility, giving people a forum to put their music up and giving them control of their distribution and their creative content.”
Jay mentioned the Discovery Plan, where new talent that any major artist has found on the service can thrive. He says by introducing these artists to the world, they will be “inspired by that sound. It gets a little ethereal from there, but just the possibilities of what TIDAL can do are really exciting, on a creative front.”
What will this mean for the future of the music industry? Will independent artists be able to use this as a platform to help them find their fans?
You can read the the rest of the interview here.
There’s a new player in the music streaming scene, and that badboy is Tidal, Jay-Z’s relaunched music streaming service which is poised to shake up Spotify’s grip on the market, or at the very least, stimulate about a week’s worth of intense debate about the ethics of music streaming and the how we pay for our ‘digital art’. If you’ve lived under a rock the past few days, let us bring you up to speed. Basically, Jay-Z decided to drop $54 mil on a tiny Norweigan streaming service and its parent company Aspiro and turn it into Tidal, the “first artist-owned global music and entertainment platform”. Tidal launched with a fanfare of A-list supporters (Beyonce, Nicki Minaj, Coldplay, Kanye West, Arcade Fire, Jack White and Daft Punk to name a few), some of the lamest sentences uttered in human history (“bringing humanity back to being artists” – WTF?) and not to mention a shudder-worthy social campaign (No Kanye, I will not be making my profile picture blue and hashtagging #TIDALforALL. You’re drunk.) Tidal’s promise is “high-fidelity sound, high definition music videos and expertly curated editorial”. It’s been two days, and already there are people from either camp rattling their fists at each other and debating the viability of the service.
The key ‘selling points’ of Tidal are:
- Better dosh for the musos: The artists own the music themselves, apparently through equity in Tidal, giving them a bigger cut of the pie
- A two-tier pricing model (that’s on the exxy side): $9.99 a month for a basic subscription, and $19.99 a month for high-definition, CD-quality ‘lossless’ audio (and no free tier a-la Spotify’s free-plus-ads service – so Swifty, kindly heel your frothing-at-the-mouth lawyers)
- Exclusive content: there’s some decent, can’t-find-it-anywhere-else content (all of Swift’s catalogue, plus exclusives from Jack White, Arcade Fire and Daft Punk to name a few) with more promised in the future (it seems that dealing in exclusives is a strategy favoured by Jay-Z, who released his last album Magna Carta Holy Grail exclusively for Samsung Galaxy Users before anyone else could hear it)
- There’s a great blog section (interestingly, mostly written by freelancers) with interviews from Courtney Barnett, Modest Mouse and Jimmy Page, guides to SXSW and more (but for now, this is freely accessible.)
So far so good, right? Putting aside the fact that it’s a bunch of the biggest names in music essentially engaged in one big circle-jerk, it’s all fine and noble. Yes, it’s great that artists will get paid more for their contributions – but it’s some of the biggest artists in the world we’re talking about here, and it’s likely a case of ‘the rich get rich, and the poorer get poorer’. The extent to which artists will be paid more is unclear and anecdotal right now, and in any case, Spotify doesn’t appear to be quite the cheapskate we thought it was (remember the Spotify-didn’t-pay-Swifty-enough saga, which has been revealed to be a bit of a numbers game.)
It’s not clear how independent and new artists will be supported and promoted on Tidal and we’d really like to see Jay-Z leverage his influence to create a platform that benefits aspiring artists, not just Rihanna and Calvin Harris. In a nutshell, it feels like a bunch of celebrities patting themselves on the back for being humble and awesome, but ultimately doing something that’s self-serving – creating a premium service for premium pay, for premium people.
Putting aside the exclusive content and the ‘artists getting better paychecks’ argument, Tidal’s key differentiator is its high-definition, ‘lossless’ audio. So does it really justify the price tag? Well, the average person, using the average headphones, realistically won’t be able to tell the difference (that’s pretty much the bulk of us.) There is hope for audiophiles (the kind of people who’ll drop $10k on a home stereo set-up,) where with the right equipment, the CD-quality audio apparently delivers. Interestingly, this premium offering has some market-experts thinking that Tidal is aiming to compete around, rather than with Spotify, creating an aspirational brand for its ‘I’ll have the best and nothing but the best’ listeners.
But let’s come back to these “exclusive releases.” What’s exclusive in 2015, anyway? Word on the street is that the Daft Punk exclusive 2006 video, Electroma, was already available on YouTube, and for the truly dedicated, pretty much anything can be downloaded in some work-around, dodgy way about 3 seconds after a first release online. Unless they start taking away more from Spotify (say, if Random Access Memories or the White Stripes discography was removed,) the exclusives may not be a massive drawcard for Tidal.
Tidal is intriguing, but it hasn’t really given us a good enough reason to pay more for music and make the effort to migrate from Spotify or other streaming services – yet. That said, there’s a lot of potential in Tidal and we’re interested to see where it goes next, particularly if we can see it using its leverage to support up-and-coming artists (say, through interesting strategies like microfunding and crowdsourcing,) using socials in new and interesting ways (allowing the Tidal community to engage with artists and other users seamlessly and in real-time,) offering a flawless, high quality user experience with the application itself, as well as genuinely compelling offerings (exclusives that really push the boundaries and get us excited, like some Netflix Original releases.)
With Spotify’s first-mover-advantage and its existing, 15 million user-strong footing in the market, ultimately it comes down to time, and how compelling Tidal’s value proposition is, to see whether it begins to pull users from Spotify and make a real niche for itself. So watch this space.
For now, it’s back to my Taylor Swift-less Spotify. Swifty, you and Tidal may have won this round – but next time you have a hit song out that I want to listen to, as a child of the 80s, so help me God if it comes to it I’ll pull out my old tape recorder and tape your latest hit from the radio. You have been warned.