The self-proclaimed genius Jay-Z officially launched Tidal in the US last night, and as you can see from the video he has teamed up with a bunch of great artists. The verdict is still out on whether or not Tidal will get a proper foothold in an already crowded marked, and I figured I’ll weigh in with some of my thoughts on the situation.
Jay-Z is involved in many ventures, and as he sings about: _He’s not a businessman, he’s a business, man! _I am convinced his primary motivation for buying Tidal is commercial, and there are some reasons as to why it could be a good idea. The most obvious one is pricing.
Spotify, along with most other streaming services, are still hesitating to cross the $10-barrier for their product, as it probably will make it more difficult to acquire new customers. Tidal already have a “premium-premium”-alternative, where users can pay twice the amount for lossless quality. I do not think there are many people in the world that care about lossless quality, but what’s more important is that this feature legitimizes a higher price.
By introducing this higher price point, it’s easy to differentiate further on features/content between these two products (lossless and regular). Artists like Taylor Swift left Spotify because of poor earnings, but I imagine a doubling of her revenue would have her reconsider. The lossless/high-quality image can be used by some artists to disguise their hidden agenda (making more money), and thus Tidal can get access to content that few other services do.
Furthermore, the lineup at yesterday’s event showed Jay-Z’s powerful network within the music industry. If all those artists chose to release music exclusively on Tidal going forward, I would personally consider switching service. Hopefully that will not happen, as a content-war between Tidal, Spotify etc will only hurt the users (and would make people like me go back to pirating). But a streaming service where artists’ have a bigger saying could definitely be positive, as not everything is the way it should be.
So what do I think will happen to Tidal? Honestly, I do not know. As a Spotify Premium-subscriber I find myself using it less and less, and instead streaming (free) music from Youtube, Soundcloud and Hypem. I am a firm believer in that all content eventually will be free, and I question whether the music streaming business model is here to stay at all. If I were to abandon the Spotify platform, it would probably be in favor of free services like the aforementioned – and not Tidal. But, if they are able to build the perfect music streaming service, with a catalogue of all the music I want to listen to (which includes soundcloud-tracks etc), I might listen (pun intended). This, however, will be difficult. If they try to differentiate on content, most probably all the other players will do the same as well – and such a content-fragmentation would only increase the probability that I (and probably many others) choose free/pirated-music.
What is more interesting with Tidal is that, regardless of outcome, they are not competing on technology. Jay-Z bought a fully functional music streaming platform for some fifty million dollars, and will differentiate themselves from Spotify and others using “soft features” that companies competed on also long before the internet. The technology is still there, but it “just works” in the background. More on that in another blog post.
(Source: https://twitter.com/)