Tidal Gotcha Money...

If you slept on the iHeart Radio awards, you slept on Rihanna’s ‘Bitch Better Have My Money’ bars that indicated its time for artist to get whats due to them. In a Twitter post Rihanna stated, “NAVY, turn the tide.” 

WHHHHHHAAATT? Well the story begins with Jay-Z’s $56.2 million dollar purchase of a Swedish streaming company Aspiro.  A countdown clock on the TIDAL homepage moves closer to the 5 o’clock Eastern Standard Time launch. TIDAL is a high-definition music streaming service. The company has been sending out invites for a press conference today, in which Jay-Z will announce, “a commitment to a new direction for the music industry from both a creative and business

perspective.” The unofficial buzz is, the company will be using the event to confirm the first big-name artists to stream music exclusively on the Tidal platform. 

Over the weekend, the Swedish blog Breakit reported — citing sources close to the deal — that Tidal’s plan of attack will be to ink first-window deals with the artists, where Tidal would get first releases of tracks from big-name artists ahead of any other digital streaming services. This would be exclusive, but only for a period: Spotify, Pandora and others would eventually also get these tracks, but only later. Now that is major!

What’s in it for these artists? From what I’ve found on the net. It seems that Tidal may offer a more attractive set of terms to musicians than other streaming services — often agreeing to payouts of twice as much as its rivals. Now do you hear Rihanna singing “Bitch Better

Have My Money?”  Many artists have been complaining that digital music streaming is not providing decent enough returns. This makes the rumored deal TIDAL very appealing. But it’s a bit of a long shot when you do the comparison with its biggest rival Spotify. 

TIDAL currently offers some 25 million tracks and 75,000 music videos. Users can currently sign up to Tidal for either $9.99 or $19.99 a month. Unlike Spotify, Tidal doesn’t have a free tier, and its standard-quality subscription is available for the same price as Spotify Premium package $9.99. Not to mention Tidal has only 35,000 subscribers paying $19.99 per month, where as Spotify had 15 million paying subscribers in January. The numbers may be off but the Jay-Z connection along with his ROC Nation brand would ease the mind of any artist who even began to give this deal a questionable thought. 

Remember I spoke of a change is going to come…Here’s the ball rolling in that change direction! 

#LeslieMac