Image Courtesy of Tidal.com
TIDAL, the first "HIFI" (High Fidelity) lossless music streaming service to hit the market. Any music lover should be ecstatic, but it comes at a premium price. Apparently Jay Z acquired the company in a $56 million deal. Jay Z reportedly offered millions of dollars and/or stock to Artists and Icons in the industry to join as co-owners. Artist giants to all have input and say how music, including theirs is output, very cool idea! The TIDAL Avengers include Jay Z & Beyonce, Chris Martin of Coldplay, Rihanna, Thomas Bangalter & Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo of Daft Punk, Alicia Keys, Calvin Harris, Jack White, Madonna, Usher, Win Butler & Regine Chassagne of Arcade Fire, and lastly Joel Thomas Zimmerman aka Deadmau5. The commotion started when the co-owners started changing their profile pictures on social medias to TIDAL blue and hash tag #TIDALforALL .
Their only competition I can clearly see is Spotify's streaming service. Spotify is free to desktop users with ads or on mobile with in shuffle mode with ads as well. Spotify offers a premium service of $9.99 with no ads and free to play music on any platform. But their only down fall is the quality of compressed audio, TIDAL is completely lossless and has speed. Reminds me of the first version of Pied Piper from the HBO show Silicon Valley. TIDAL's target audience is in the premium marketplace, their press page states "The ideal music service for those who care about quality". TIDAL's premium service comes with a price tag of $19.99 a month for HIFI sound. They also provide HD music related video content, a library of 25 million tracks that's growing every week, 75,000 music videos, and curated music related editorials written by "experts". Now they do offer a downgraded $9.99 a month service for Spotify quality sound along with the video and editorial perks. That brings some competition for Spotify! Watch the extravagant launch video that they live streamed yesterday on their site!