After years of Pandora and Spotify controlling music streaming services, there is finally a new kid on the block.

Tidal, a music streaming service that originated in Scandinavia in 2009, was acquired by Jay Z for $56 million in back January. The company was rebranded and relaunched on March 30 with support from its co-owners — who also happen to be some of the biggest names in the music industry today, such as Beyoncé, Kanye West and Daft Punk. Tidal offers a standard subscription for $9.99 per month and a $19.99 per month version that boasts higher sound quality and music videos. Tidal is being marketed as the first artist-owned global music and entertainment platform and promises to pay artists more royalties than any other streaming service.

Tidal represents a much needed shift in the music industry and accounts for the growing access of free music online and the decline in traditional album sales. However, the new streaming company will face an uphill battle to attract subscribers because of its pricing model and the lack of differentiating features from its competitors: Spotify and Pandora. It will be a challenge to convert users in the early stages, but the success of Tidal would be beneficial to the music industry and future artists.

Tidal’s biggest advantage is its ability to exclusively release new content from its A-list artists. However, Tidal has to prove that it can actually protect its music from being pirated across the Internet, which is by no means an easy task. Album leaks and illegal music downloads have become commonplace online behavior and it would require a large security staff to constantly monitor and prevent pirating.

Tidal is also promoting a HiFi lossless sound quality that is superior to all other streaming services. Both Spotify and Pandora compress their music files and by doing so produce a slightly lower sound quality than Tidal, but the difference is hardly noticeable. In a blind comparison study done by Complex in an April 3 article, the majority of testers correctly guessed which soundbyte had the HiFi sound quality but the same testers said the difference wasn’t nearly significant enough to pay $19.99 per month. And no one was really complaining about either service’s sound quality to begin with.

It will be hard to convince the average music listener to add another bill to their expenses and pay close to $240 a year for marginally better sound quality.

At the moment, it looks like the company’s plan is to make the wealthiest artists even wealthier, but to be fair, the shift in power from record labels to artists had to begin somewhere. Tidal may not have the best odds at outlasting its streaming counterparts, but I believe that this isn’t just a crafty business scheme and that the company truly believes in returning the value of music to what it once was.

Jay Z said in an interview with Billboard on March 30: “If…The very least we did was make people wake up and try to improve the free vs. paid system, and promote fair trade, then it would be a win for us anyway.”
Tidal should continue to improve its app’s interface and Tidal’s co-owners such as Beyoncé and Rihanna should use exclusive music releases to turn this new streaming service into a must-have for music lovers.

The renaissance of technological advances over the past decade has caused the music industry to adapt on the fly. While it is a longshot, I hope Tidal turns into the music streaming service that figures out the formula for satisfying both artists and consumers. Not for wealth, but for the sake of music.

Aarick Knighton is a junior information management and technology major. His column appears weekly. He can be reached at adknight@syr.edu and followed on Twitter @aarickurban.

Published on April 7, 2015 at 11:41 pm