Member Since: 5/25/2010
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Tidal Dead; Jay Z can't save it
Tidal Dead; Jay Z Can't Save It
Quote:
If Tidal is anything it’s a force in pop culture, not the streaming game.
Parker Hall
DT Writer, Portland, OR
@PWHall
Between the constantly rotating door of executives, multiple flopped record releases, and a steady onslaught of lawsuits surrounding the company, the streaming music service is a mess. Tidal isn’t the poster child for artists’ rights it set out to be. In fact, many industry members would say that Tidal is actually fueling piracy.
Tidal’s business model might be unsustainable
Tidal claims to be paying the vast majority of its revenue — and five times the amount per play as Spotify — back to artists and labels in the form of royalties. That sounds generous and progressive, until one realizes that larger music services don’t pay more because they simply can’t afford to.
Services like Apple Music, Rhapsody, SoundCloud, and Spotify all lose massive amounts of money each year. So how can Tidal stay afloat given they pay so much more for music and have a significantly lower subscriber count? The numbers, at least from a distance, don’t appear to add up.
Tidal is getting eaten alive by its competition
Tidal’s own artists are jumping ship in search of higher streaming and sales numbers at rival services
The reality of the low-margin streaming music business is: more plays = more money, regardless of where those plays come from. Tidal can’t change that. The service may pay higher rates per stream than competitors, but its competition has exponentially more users, forcing most artists to embrace other services like Apple Music and Spotify, even if they pay less.
For example, based on music streaming royalty reports, it takes 81,000 streams per month to make Federal minimum wage via Tidal, whereas it takes 242,000 Spotify plays to reach the same goal. Spotify requires more streams, certainly, but since it has over 10 times the number of paying users, musicians will likely make their nut much faster with Spotfiy than Tidal. And that’s just one alternate streaming service. Apple music only serves to increase the odds that a musician will bank significant revenue.
Tidal exclusives are a bad idea for any musician, large or small. Yet the company keeps pressing for them, resulting in an unintended yet very real consequence: piracy.
[After the release of "The Life of Pablo"], Kanye West threatened to sue The Pirate Bay (the internet equivalent of shaking one’s fist angrily in the air), then went back on his word and made the album available to every major service. (Oh, and then he was apparently caught using The Pirate Bay to steal music software.)
They go through executives like seasonal fruit
Since it first opened its doors stateside in 2015, Tidal has gone through an extraordinary number of executives. The company has had three CEOs, recently fired its CFO and COO, and lost its original Chief Investment Officer and Senior VP of Label Relations last year. At this point, it’s almost easier to say which executives have left the company than who remains working there. Such high turnover is an extremely bad sign for the health of any company.
Even Jay-Z wants his money back
Jay-Z is suing the former owners of the service for alleged lies about subscriber numbers when he purchased the company. When the owner of a struggling company waits a year, then sues the people he bought it from, the company is in dire straits.
But if that weren’t enough to generate concern, this should: Samsung — the biggest corporate backer of many of Tidal’s biggest artists — doesn’t want to buy it.
Read full article here
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Jesus H. Christ. I think we all knew Tidal was in bad shape, but not THIS bad.
So many executives having left is shocking. Samsung not wanting to buy it and the fact that
Tidal is barely kept afloat solely due to Rihanna, Beyoncé, and Kanye West. 
...Vin
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