Jay-Z rhymes off tweet-storm in defence of his music service
Jay-Z unleashed a series of tweets on Sunday defending Tidal, the musicstreaming service he bought and relaunched a little over a month ago.
Tidal, a Swedish-based music-streaming service, entered an already-crowded market, with the backing of several highprofile artists, promising higher-quality audio files and more money going directly to the artists.
However, since its launch, consumers do not appear to have embraced the service and last week, the app fell out of the list of top 750 apps on the iOS app store, after peaking at 83 on April 7.
In response to the negative publicity, Jay-Z unleashed a 15-missive tweetstorm Sunday, attempting to set the record straight against the “many big companies that are spending millions on a smear campaign.” Among the highlights: “Tidal is doing just fine. We have over 770,000 subs. We have been in business less than one month.”
“Tidal pays 75% royalty rate to ALL artists, writers and producers — not just the founding members on stage.”
But there still is a long way to go. Tidal’s 770,000 subscribers are relatively small compared to the current market leader, Spotify, which as of January 2015 had 15 million paying subscribers and 60 million users.
Jay-Z’s final tweet pointed to an exclusive concert by Jack White on the service. That might be the path to success, or at least differentiation, for the service. So far, Tidal’s exclusives have not seemed impressive enough to galvanize consumer interest. Part of the issue is that because of the number of existing record label deals with artists, it’s hard to get truly exclusive content.
Another issue is timing. Unlike streaming video, where there is a dogfight to create or lock up exclusive content for rival services — which can easily be seen in Canada as Netflix, Shomi and Crave all issuing press releases when they sign a deal for new series of exclusives with networks — music streaming is already commoditized and many of the rival services all have huge libraries with much of the same content.
While the service definitely faces an uphill struggle, there may be some truth to the allegations about the competition. The New York Post’s gossip site Page Six reported last week that Apple executives have “declared war on artists who sign up with Tidal” and that the company may be taking longer to publish updates to Tidal in a pre-emptive move to help its relaunch of Beats Music, which is scheduled for June.