Much has been made about the failure of Jay-Z'sTidal over the last week. The new streaming media service that was launched last month with the splashy press conference in New York has seen its fair share of the detractors. Recently the lead singer of Death Cab For Cutie said in an interview that the service would "Fail miserably" and British pop singer lily Allen said that the arrival of the streaming service would lead to even more piracy.
What started off with such a promising beginning, that included seeing Tidal's music app rise to the top five in the app store, has now seen the app drop out of the top 700 and multiple personnel changes in the upper management of the company. PR for the company had gotten so bad that at one point co-owners Jay-Z and Jack White were calling subscribers personally to ensure them that nothing was wrong with the company.
What does this mean for Tidal in particular and streaming music as a whole?Full disclosure, here brownstone we are avid users of Spotify and in fact encourage you to look into our playlist on Spotify weekly.Streaming music is a boon and anyone who says differently has become oblivious to the struggles that the music industry has been going through for the last decade. With consumers less and less willing to spend hard-earned cash on albums and physical CDs, streaming music has provided a viable alternative for an industry that quickly saw a rise in piracy with the digital age. Labels and Artist were faced with an audience that increasingly saw it as their right to download any song that they wanted with no calls but also became disdainful of the music industry's cries of poverty. Streaming music offers a compromise. All-you-can-eat music at a flat monthly rate. But like most things the easy solution quickly became the difficult problem. Artist found that they were not getting what they saw as fair compensation for their work with the buffet style music offering.
Tidal is designed to change that. Offering the highest return to artists in the industry. But perhaps Tidal's downfall was written in its splashy entrance to the market. Competitors like Spotify and Pandora have spent millions of dollars and have had years to justify their presence in the market. Whereas Tidal the new kid on the block is going to have to go through those growing pains all over again. One thing that's for certain over the next we will quickly find out whether Jay-Z's celebrity cachet and the promise of better artist representation will lead to a successful alternative to what's quickly becoming a two dog race between Pandora and Spotify.
What started off with such a promising beginning, that included seeing Tidal's music app rise to the top five in the app store, has now seen the app drop out of the top 700 and multiple personnel changes in the upper management of the company. PR for the company had gotten so bad that at one point co-owners Jay-Z and Jack White were calling subscribers personally to ensure them that nothing was wrong with the company.
What does this mean for Tidal in particular and streaming music as a whole?Full disclosure, here brownstone we are avid users of Spotify and in fact encourage you to look into our playlist on Spotify weekly.Streaming music is a boon and anyone who says differently has become oblivious to the struggles that the music industry has been going through for the last decade. With consumers less and less willing to spend hard-earned cash on albums and physical CDs, streaming music has provided a viable alternative for an industry that quickly saw a rise in piracy with the digital age. Labels and Artist were faced with an audience that increasingly saw it as their right to download any song that they wanted with no calls but also became disdainful of the music industry's cries of poverty. Streaming music offers a compromise. All-you-can-eat music at a flat monthly rate. But like most things the easy solution quickly became the difficult problem. Artist found that they were not getting what they saw as fair compensation for their work with the buffet style music offering.
Tidal is designed to change that. Offering the highest return to artists in the industry. But perhaps Tidal's downfall was written in its splashy entrance to the market. Competitors like Spotify and Pandora have spent millions of dollars and have had years to justify their presence in the market. Whereas Tidal the new kid on the block is going to have to go through those growing pains all over again. One thing that's for certain over the next we will quickly find out whether Jay-Z's celebrity cachet and the promise of better artist representation will lead to a successful alternative to what's quickly becoming a two dog race between Pandora and Spotify.
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