Fellow Tidal co-owners Calvin Harris and Chris Martin helped to announce the relaunch of Tidal via video link.
Jay Z told Billboard he "didn't like the direction music was going" and believed "we could get in and strike an honest blow".
Artists hosted on Tidal will be paid double the royalties offered by other music streaming services, it has been rumored.
Jay Z said: "Will artists make more money? Even if it means less profit for our bottom line, absolutely.
"That's easy for us. We can do that. Less profit for our bottom line, more money for the artist. Fantastic."
Tidal hopes to differentiate itself from rivals including Rdio, Xbox Music, Google Play Music All Access, Spotify, Deezer and Napster by offering 16-bit FLAC format songs.
FLAC – which stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec – is a lossless compression format. This means it acts more like a ZIP file – FLAC will compress an audio file but it should sound identical in quality to its unzipped equivalent.
As a result, FLAC files are typically much larger than those stored in other audio formats, like Mp3 and Ogg Vorbis (which is used by Spotify).
At the end of last year, Tidal had 500,000 paying users while Spotify, which launched in 2006, boasts more than 45 million free users, and 15 million paying customers.
"Our intent is to preserve music's importance in our lives," proclaimed Alicia Keys on stage at the relaunch of Tidal, a streaming music service recently bought by Jay Z for $56m. Keys was standing there not as an artist, but as an "owner" - along with other megastars like Daft Punk, Beyoncé, Calvin Harris, Rihanna and Kanye West. Who does she mean by "our lives"?
Probably not us.
We have never been able to listen to more music, whether it is on Spotify, iTunes, YouTube, to new music on Soundcloud and mixtapes on Mixcloud; browsing in real life in however many HMVs are still knocking about, or buying vinyl in independent record stores.
"Our intent is to preserve music's importance in our lives," proclaimed Alicia Keys on stage at the relaunch of Tidal, a streaming music service recently bought by Jay Z for $56m. Keys was standing there not as an artist, but as an "owner" - along with other megastars like Daft Punk, Beyoncé, Calvin Harris, Rihanna and Kanye West. Who does she mean by "our lives"?
Probably not us.
We have never been able to listen to more music, whether it is on Spotify, iTunes, YouTube, to new music on Soundcloud and mixtapes on Mixcloud; browsing in real life in however many HMVs are still knocking about, or buying vinyl in independent record stores.
Sales of vinyl hit 9.2 million in 2014, the highest figure in more than two decades.
Before the re launch, big selling artists changed their avatars to a tasteful light blue and tweeted #TIDALforALL, encouraging their followers to do the same: an advert disguised as social activism.
Tidal is not for all.
It is not about those listening to the music - it is about those making it. Specifically, those already making a lot of money from it.
Tidal is charging £9.99 a month for a basic subscription, and £19.99 for a high-quality audio subscription.
There is no free version.
This is not a mass market proposition, unless Tidal really believes people are willing to pay more for their music so that Deadmau5 can be a bit richer.
Keys pitched the service as "the first artist-owned global music and entertainment platform".
It is clear that this does not mean much for emerging musicians, whose exclusivity will not be worth much equity.
Many artists feel that streaming gives them a raw deal. Spotify pays less than a penny per stream of a song.
The problem is that Tidal, as it is presented right now, will not be able to compete with Spotify, which itself is going to be enjoying life a little bit less with YouTube and Apple's new music streaming services.
As a result, Spotify says it paid $1bn to the music industry in 2014.
Spotify and other streaming services like Pandora are trying to unlock that value for the industry, from up and coming artists to megastars - and of course themselves as businesses.
At the same time, their free versions have helped reduce online music piracy to its lowest level in years.
Tidal is not an attempt to displace Spotify, or YouTube or Apple.
As Jay Z told Billboard, addressing Apple's Beats service: "I don’t have to lose in order for you guys to win and let's just remember that."
Tidal's superstars know that their music in particular is valuable, and are simply trying to carve out a little bit more of that value for themselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment