People don’t want to pay for music. Why pay when there are so many options to listen for free? The internet has made it easy to avoid dishing out the dough for music at all, even to achieve access to millions of songs for a low monthly fee from a streaming service.
The newest service to attempt to break into the already crowded market is TIDAL. Owned by Jay-Z, Beyonce, Kanye West, Jack White, Madonna and other A-List musicians, TIDAL has emerged from being an unknown company to a headline-stealing streaming service aimed at providing compensation for the artists whose music it plays. It began as Aspiro, a Swedish technology company centered on innovating music consumption, before Jay-Z bought the company for $54 million.
TIDAL is available for either $10 or $20 per month, or a 30-day free trial period. The $20 plan boosts TIDAL’s HI-FI sound, an industry first. According to TIDAL’s info page, TIDAL is “unlike any other service currently on the market. TIDAL offers high fidelity sound quality, high definition music videos, and curated editorial, expertly crafted by experienced music journalists.”
The $10 plan, does not feature HI-FI sound quality. Judge for yourself here if the $10 difference is worth it. On computer speakers and cheap headphones, the difference is not perceptible. Both sound great, but the difference is essentially similar to HD versus Blu-Ray. One is slightly better, if you know how to tell the difference.
The best features of TIDAL are the exclusive playlists and artist recommendations. Playlists can be divided by genre, theme, decade or by artist. The lists focus on combining smash hits with lesser known gems to provide a playlist that dives below surface level knowledge. The Legend Series playlists are great starting points for understanding what a band is all about. Led Zeppelin, The Who, The Rolling Stones, as well as more modern legends such as Green Day and Daft Punk are a few of the many Legend series currently available.
TIDAL is dedicated to delivering your favorite music, but there is also an emphasis on discovering the bands that influenced your favorite bands.
The big question for such a young company is: Is it worth it?
If you already happily use Spotify or any other of the plethora of streaming services available, then you probably won’t benefit a great deal from switching. Spotify is the giant right now with 60 million users, 15 million of who are paying subscribers. College students can receive Spotify Premium for $4.99, giving a slight edge to TIDAL on the grounds of cost alone.
It is still fairly unclear if artists (other than the owners) will actually receive compensation for their music being played, per this article by The New Yorker, until TIDAL begins to turn a profit.
Many people scoff at the idea of rich artists complaining about not making all of the money they possibly can off of their music, but for struggling artists, TIDAL could possibly keep them financially stable in the future if the idea takes off, and that is worth supporting.
Follow Craig on Twitter @wgwcraig