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Tidal

Tidal16 posts

Tidal is a streaming music service launched by Jay Z in April 2015.

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26 Apr, 2015

Defends Tidal

Makes Statement1 Comments

Jay-Z defends Tidal in a series of Tweets.

Tidal is doing just fine. We have over 770,000 subs. We have been in business less than one month…The iTunes Store wasn’t built in a day. It took Spotify 9 years to be successful…We are here for the long haul. Please give us a chance to grow & get better…There are many big companies that are spending millions on a smear campaign. We are not anti-anyone, we are pro-artist & fan…We made Tidal for fans. We have more than just music. We have video, exclusive concerts, tickets for events early, live sports!..Tidal is where artists can give their fans more without the middlemen…Indie artists who want to work directly w/ us keep 100% of their music. “If you don’t want the CEOs all in the videos” haa

15 Apr, 2015

Criticizes Tidal

Makes Statement0 Comments

Albini calls Tidal a “budget version of Pono” and says it won’t make a significant dent in the market, and says people who want lossless sound will always prefer vinyl:

if you want your music to play at the push of a button, convenience is going to trump sound quality 100 percent of the time. It’s for the same reason that if you had a screen that displayed paintings in your living room, very few serious art enthusiasts would care for such a screen despite the fact that it might show you very high-resolution images of artworks. They want to own a piece of art that is a direct connection to the person who made it. Having an HD screen in your house that would display artwork might have a market, but it’s not the same market as people who are interested in owning art.

The for-pay services are deluding themselves by trying to establish a permanent monetization of something that’s in flux. The internet provides access to materials and things. Creating these little streaming fiefdoms where certain streaming services have certain artists and certain streaming services have other artists is a crippled use of the internet. If the internet has demonstrated anything over the years, it’s that it has a way of breaking limitations placed on its content.

Criticizes Tidal

Makes Statement0 Comments
Gibbard says the streaming music service is dead on arrival.

If I had been Jay Z, I would have brought out ten artists that were underground or independent and said, ‘These are the people who are struggling to make a living in today’s music industry. Whereas this competitor streaming site pays this person 15 cents for X amount of streams, that same amount of streams on my site, on Tidal, will pay that artist this much. I think they totally blew it by bringing out a bunch of millionaires and billionaires and propping them up onstage and then having them all complain about not being paid. There was a wonderful opportunity squandered to highlight what this service would mean for artists who are struggling and to make a plea to people’s hearts and pocketbooks to pay a little more for this service that was going to pay these artists a more reasonable streaming rate. And they didn’t do it. That’s why this thing is going to fail miserably.

Criticizes Tidal

Makes Statement0 Comments

In an interview the band respond to the mention of TIDAL with “a series of loud fart sounds”. Marcus:

We wouldn’t have joined it anyway, even if they had asked. We don’t want to be tribal. I think smaller bands should get paid more for it, too. Bigger bands have other ways of making money, so I don’t think you can complain. A band of our size shouldn’t be complaining. And when they say it’s artist-owned, it’s owned by those rich, wealthy artists. What I’m not into is the tribalistic aspect of it—people trying to corner bits of the market, and put their face on it. That’s just commercial bullshit. We hire people to do that for us rather than having to do that ourselves. We just want to play music, and I don’t want to align myself with Spotify, Beats, Tidal, or whatever. We want people to listen to our music in their most comfortable way, and if they’re not up for paying for it, I don’t really care.

Marshall:

We don’t want to be part of some Tidal ‘streaming revolution’ nor do we want to be Taylor Swift and be anti-it. I don’t understand her argument, either. The focus is slightly missed. Music is changing. It’s f-cking changing. This is how people are going to listen to music now—streaming. So diversify as a band. It doesn’t mean selling your songs to adverts. We look at our albums as stand-alone pieces of art, and also as adverts for our live shows.

6 Apr, 2015

Criticizes Tidal

Makes Statement0 Comments

Allen criticizes the streaming music site on Twitter:

i LOVE Jay z so much, but TIDAL is soon expensive compared to other perfectly good streaming services, he’s taken the biggest Artists, made them exclusive to TIDAL (am i right in thinking this ?). People are going to swarm back to pirate sites in droves, sending traffic to torrent sites. Up and coming (not yet millionaires) artists are going to suffer as a result… my concern is that Tidal may set emerging artists back.  WE COULD JUST STRIKE TILL THE LABELS GIVE US OUR FAIR SHARE OF STREAMING REVENUE, NOT TAKE ADVANCES, NOT DELIVER MUSIC, FOR THE FUTURE ARTIST…A REAL REVOLUTION YEAH…….. GUYS………. GUYS……….. USHER?…….. MADGE……. DAFT PUNKS?? GUYS???????? *WAVES AT YACHT*.

Clarifying later:

Just to clarify… i really don’t give a f-ck about the music industry, well, I care about a few good eggs that work within it and am grateful to the people who have helped me develop as an artist. My concern is that Tidal may set emerging artists back. Hosting exclusive consent from the biggest stars on the planet on a paying platform, while i agree with its intention, i fear it will send people back to pirate/torrent sites.” It’s an interesting point, but surely those that can’t (or won’t) pay for TIDAL will just continue using Spotify instead of turning to piracy?