The 16 biggest names in pop music gathered onstage for a big announcement Monday, but they all forgot to announce anything. The occasion was the star-studded relaunch of a music streaming service called Tidal, a celebrity-backed venture that united Madonna, Jay Z, Beyonce, Kanye West, Daft Punk, deadmau5 and many other famed musicians onstage. Each of these artists is presumably an investor in the project, which seeks to change the streaming music revenue model that many artists feel drastically shortchanges them.
Will Tidal have any exclusive music that I won’t find elsewhere? They didn’t say. Will Tidal remain ad-free? They didn’t say. How will Tidal provide me with a music listening experience unlike any other? They didn’t say. In fact, they didn’t say much of anything at Tidal’s introductory press conference (already available on YouTube). But look at the bright side… at least Kanye didn’t interrupt anyone onstage!
The music streaming sector is already pretty crowded, and Tidal enters an arena where there’s plenty of competition. You can hear the latest streaming music industry strategies on marketing automation and last click attribution when executives from the world’s biggest streaming music service Pandora take the stage to present at the ad:tech SF digital marketing conference (May 20-21 in San Francisco).
According to their website, Tidal is “the first music streaming service that combines the best High Fidelity sound quality, High Definition music videos and expertly Curated Editorial.” (In my experience, “expertly curated” means the curation is done by bots.) Nonetheless, Tidal made a splash by bringing 16 of the biggest names in music onstage for a celebrity unveiling of their relaunched product.
But nothing was unveiled at the celebrity unveiling. The Tidal press conference completely lacked any form of news, announcement or description of the service. When you livestream a big announcement and then don’t announce anything, you are probably going to catch hell on Twitter. And that’s exactly what happened.
“This Tidal thing only makes me more eager to illegally download the music from all these artists that are participating on it,” tweeted @imjauregui4u.
“FINALLY an alternative to Spotify, SoundCloud, Rdio, Pandora, Pono Music, YouTube, Deezer, Simfy, Songza, Grooveshark, Upbeat & Whyd,” joked @AustinBloggy.
“The TIDAL promo video kind of reminds me of ‘We Are the World,’ if ‘We Are the World’ raised money for millionaires instead of poor people,” quipped @lindsayzoladz.
The harshest tweet, and the most threatening sentiment toward this new streaming service, comes from @dirtyjauregui: “i got Tidal but i personally don’t notice any audio enhancement difference like it said there would be.”
This feeling could be lethal toward Tidal’s business model. Tidal is charging $ 9.99/month for standard access and $ 19.99/month for “lossless” music streaming which is allegedly of much higher audio quality. But they did not explain exactly how this music would have better audio quality. Most of us listen to streaming music on mobile devices whose sound hardware is unlikely to take much advantage of higher-quality sound files.
Curious about this, I signed up for Tidal’s email list. They sent me an email saying, “Thank you for your interest in TIDAL. Stay tuned for more to come.”
You can see certainly see the benefits of Tidal for the recording artists — they get more money! From a consumer standpoint, it is unclear how subscribing to Tidal represents any form of advantage.
There is probably a market for individuals willing to pay a $ 20-ish monthly fee to ensure better equity distribution to the artists whose music is being streamed. But putting 16 millionaires onstage to cry poor is no way to engage that segment. The new service may have some impressive exclusives and features to roll out in the near future, but Tidal’s introductory announcement was a wash.
To learn more about reaching and engaging your audience, don’t miss Ad in AdTech, one of five tracks at ad:tech San Francisco 2015.
Jay Z's new streaming music Tidal brings wave of disappointment - FanIQ
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