Monday brought the splashy relaunch of Tidal, the hi-fi streaming music service offered by the Swedish company Aspiro and now helmed by a slew of boldfaced-name "artist stakeholders," including Jack White, Arcade Fire’s Win Butler and Régine Chassagne, Daft Punk, Nicki Minaj, and Jay Z, whose purchase of Aspiro was recently finalized. The launch, which was accompanied by a flurry of Twitter avatar changes and a press conference that assembled the aforementioned stars as well as a few others, inspired some blowback from users who were cheesed off by the idea of paying the already-rich more money, as well as eye-rolls from those people annoyed by another new paradigm infringing on their day.
The service itself, which is available in browser-based and app form, is fairly elegant; its grey-on-black color scheme is reminiscent of Spotify’s, and navigating through the playlists on offer (which they refer to as "expertly Curated Editorial") is an easy enough experience. Tidal’s cool factor is a bit higher, as evidenced by the collection of stars on the launch’s stage, and the exclusives it’s offering as part of its rollout, which include a White Stripes public-access appearance and a Daft Punk film, are at the very least worthy of blog posts pointing in their direction.
But Tidal, as its artist-proprietors put it, is about more than playlists and unseen concert footage. "People are not respecting the music, and [are] devaluing it and devaluing what it really means," Jay Z told Billboard in an interview published Monday. "People really feel like music is free, but will pay $6 for water. You can drink water free out of the tap, and it’s good water. But they’re OK paying for it. It’s just the mind-set right now."
Tidal, in keeping with that ethos, does not have a free option the way rivals like Spotify do. The service, instead, uses rhetoric involving quality to make its pitch—and not just in terms of artists, but in terms of the audio being offered. The high-fidelity option offers streaming FLAC in CD quality for $19.99 a month.
This price point— double that of the 320 kbps option—could be viewed as a throwback to the CD era, when major-label albums routinely had a list price somewhere in the $18.99-$19.99 range. Back then, the typical music consumer was viewed as someone who purchased a single album a month, and these people were in such large supply they boosted sales of albums by Britney Spears and Santana to heights so unseen, they required a brand-new RIAA certification. Obviously, there were cheaper options available—used CDs, sales, the home taping that was killing music back in the Memorex dBS era—and many listeners, including this one, took advantage of them.
Artists are at the front of Tidal, which makes it, at least in positioning, vaguely similar to Beats Music—the streaming service that launched last year with Dr. Dre, Trent Reznor, and Interscope’s Jimmy Iovine leading its charge, and that was later purchased by Apple. Yes, the blue-skying about new business models in the introductory video was a bit overblown at times, and the launch event—which essentially showed how analog media was still important by having each artist stakeholder sign a huge piece of paper—might have been unnecessary. Not to mention that having people whose wealth and high status is paraded in both their art and the press surrounding them essentially ask for more money is slightly grating, particularly to those for whom money is tight and entertainment budgets are stretched. But having smaller artists would have ensured far less buzz. More importantly, if those same words about new paradigms had been uttered by people who were viewed as having business or tech-industry acumen, would the reaction have been any less knee-jerk skeptical?
The rhetoric of the tech press, which has come to dominate music-business coverage because of its sheer bulk and almost gluttonous willingness to swallow any PR handed to it, belies a distrust for those artists who don’t explicitly align themselves with business’ interests—which is to say, those artists who don’t release their music for free by default. This strange strain of the Protestant ethic has warped the current tech economy into something that prioritizes conduits over the material passing through them; the high valuation of Uber, which would be less useful without its army of half-employed drivers, brings to mind the rhetoric surrounding faileddigital music services that claimed they would take over the world despite their inability to ink deals with major labels. And even now, Spotify, the company viewed as a streaming-music success, still has a long way to go before the tech world’s desired outcome of world domination; not only are its payouts low, but according to Billboard, Spotify has 60 million subscribers, with only 25% of them paying the $9.99 a month to bypass ads.
In the cocktail-party-set introductory video to the service, Jay Z likened Tidal to a record store—not quite a United Artists-style consolidation of production, but more like a way for artists to assert themselves at a table increasingly crowded with technologists, online bubble-blowers, and, of course, the record-business executives who broker artist-unfriendly deals. But the record store ideal is an imperfect one—the vinyl offerings sold at White’s Third Man Records, for example, are playable on any brand of record player, and the promised "exclusives" will be available to those consumers who bought them long after the licensing deals expire.
And it’s hard to ingrain new habits and direct people toward new formats, particularly when it comes to online music services, which benefit from behind-the-scenes machinations that users never see. A minor row ensued when Taylor Swift pulled her music from Spotify, but no digital shop is immune from these baits and switches—late last fall, the subscription-download service eMusic decided to "[renew] its commitment to independent music" by abruptly ditching the major-label offerings it began selling in 2009. Users are paying for access to a catalog that ideally is similar to the long-storied "celestial jukebox," but the reality is much more checkered; think about albums that were long ago deleted from majors’ catalogs and have no hope for reissue, or 7"s released on tiny labels that ran through their lone pressing.
One trepidation regarding Tidal is that the bigger-name artists involved will pull their music from competing services—which also pay out lower royalties—in an effort to seem more exclusive, but that seems like a shoot-in-the-foot gesture that major labels would object to reflexively. The exclusives now offered by Tidal are okay, and not all that dissimilar to the carrots dangled in the directions of music blogs by publicists; a streamed film here, unseen archival footage there. And the editorial shows a willingness to highlight artists beyond big names, with smaller artists dotting the officially created playlists, like one from Screaming Females’ Marissa Paternoster featuring her influences.
Even with all the star power, though, maintaining the momentum of Monday’s launch event will be difficult in a hype-choked, instantly suspicious, already-paying-for-some-music consumer landscape. When speaking to Billboard, Jay Z talked about how Tidal could potentially change the timeline of how artists promote and release their music. "I think that now for an artist an album cycle doesn’t have to end," he said. "They’re on Instagram and Twitter and all these things, so we’re just talking about ways of extending that album cycle, and it could be anything. What if it’s a video offering tickets to the next concert, or what if it’s audio or video of the recording process? It could be anything." This seems a bit out of touch; albums barely have a pre-release cycle in 2015, which is why the "surprise" release has become the recently preferred method of catching album sales in a bottle.
But Tidal has brought the idea of paying artists back into the conversation, and put forth the radical idea that perhaps tech triumphalism should at least allow for creativity to triumph as well. Even if it misses its subscription targets, its potential to move the conversation about art and how it should be valued is more important than bluster about whatever flavor-of-the-week app its detractors are puffing up.