Thursday, May 21, 2015

A TIDAL Wave is Approaching! Or is it?

Some of you may know that Jay-Z recently released his own version of a music streaming site called Tidal.  It has been met with mixed reviews, so let’s go over the facts:

·         TIDAL is an artist owned site meaning that the artists get the profit rather than the record companies.

o   “TIDAL pays the highest percentage of royalties to artists, songwriters and producers of any music streaming service.”

·         TIDAL has high-fidelity sound.

o   “High-fidelity sound is music files that have not been compressed down.  TIDAL relies on FLAC, a more robust, more realistic streaming format than the compressed format other services use or that you will find in our $9.99 tier.

·         TIDAL does not offer a free option like Spotify or Pandora does.

o   There are two tiers: $9.99 and $19.99.

·         TIDAL is still new.

o   Jay-Z pledges that this is just the beginning and any ‘mistakes’ that have been made just means they are still learning.
So where does this leave us? As a Free Spotify listener, I can tell you right now that I don’t want to pay for the music I listen while doing homework.  However, maybe I should start paying.  Spotify pays the record companies a significantly low amount that the artist usually doesn’t see.  As someone who claims to be creative, I’d want to see the return that I worked so hard for. With Spotify and other streaming services that is not the case.

For some students paying $10 or $20 is out of the question.  However, I encourage people to think about paying. You would want to be paid for the hard work that you did too, right?

**All information was taken directly from TIDAL**

1 comment:

  1. I think that with the introduction of the new student pricing, Tidal can definitely make a splash in the market - but it will depend on if they can keep up these exclusives. Without exclusives they don't really have any way of getting into the market - but props to Jay Z for thinking about something like that - it's a very intelligent way to grab customers.

    Overall, time will tell whether or not Tidal succeeds. I might even take the free trial this summer and see how I like it (I'm currently a Google Play Music All Access subscriber and fan due to its integration into Android).

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