Tidal (stylized TIDAL) is a Norwegian-American music streaming service, launched in 2014 by Aspiro and now majority-owned by Block, Inc.[2] Tidal is available in 61 countries[1] and licenses 100 million tracks and 650,000 music videos.[3]
Tidal has distribution agreements with major and independent record labels.[4] Tidal claimed in 2015 to pay the highest percentage of royalties to music artists and songwriters within the music streaming market.[5] However, later informal studies showed that some other streaming services pay a higher percentage than Tidal.[6][7]
In March 2015, Aspiro was acquired by Project Panther Bidco Ltd., which relaunched the service with a mass-marketing campaign, promoting it as the first artist-owned streaming service. In January 2017, Sprint Corporation bought 33% of Tidal for a reported $200 million. In March 2021, Block, then known as Square, agreed to pay $297 million for majority ownership of Tidal.[8] In June, 2022, through the disclosure of the annual stockholder meeting 2022, Block reported that the stake acquired in the Tidal music service was 86.8%.[9]
While some observers praised the high-fidelity audio quality and higher subscription fees that would result in higher royalties to the artists and songwriters, others felt the high subscription fees and exclusive Tidal content from the artists involved could lead to more music piracy. Tidal claimed to have over 3 million subscribers in 2016,[10] although the veracity of those claims and the company's reported streaming numbers have been questioned.[11]
History
Branching off from WiMP, which was launched in Norway in 2010 and later available in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and Poland, Aspiro launched the Tidal brand in the UK, the US, and Canada on October 28, 2014. The launch was supported by Sonos and 15 other home audio manufacturers as integration partners.[12] In January 2015, Tidal launched in five more European countries: Ireland, Finland, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg.[4]
Aspiro was purchased by Project Panther Bidco Ltd. (controlled by American rapper and businessman Jay-Z) for SEK 466 million (USD $56.2 million) in January 2015.[13][14] Before the acquisition of Aspiro, Jay-Z stated in an interview with Billboard that he was willing to partner with other streaming services to carry out his vision. "We talked to every single service and we explored all the options," he said, "But at the end of the day, we figured if we're going to shape this thing the way we see it, then we need to have independence. And that became a better proposition for us, not an easier one, mind you," he concluded.
Platform exclusivity
A selling point for Tidal as compared with other streaming services such as Spotify and Pandora Radio is the exclusive content available from the artists who co-own the company, as well as others. Exclusive content available on the relaunch of Tidal included Rihanna's single "Bitch Better Have My Money", The White Stripes debut television appearance, Daft Punk's Electroma (2006), and playlists personally curated by Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Arcade Fire, and Coldplay.[44] In 2015, Tidal stated on its Twitter feed that "lots of exclusive content [is] on the way".[45]
Jay-Z's catalogue was not available on Spotify but was almost entirely exclusive on Tidal[46] until 2019, his 50th birthday.[47]
Reception
Shortly after Tidal's launch and press conference, the mobile version of the service entered the top 20 of the U.S. iPhone apps chart. Following criticism for its "out-of-touch marketing campaign", two weeks later, the app had already fallen out of the top 700 rankings in the same list.[71]
Praise
Glenn Peoples of Billboard wrote that Tidal was a good thing for the music industry. He stated that the U.S. streaming market needed a "kick in the butt" when looking at the growth rate of streaming from 2014 to 2015. Peoples also noted that more competition in the streaming market is a good thing as it could lead to a "greater diffusion of innovation". He concluded that a service like Tidal – which is promoted as paying a fair amount of royalties to both the artists and the songwriters – will lead to the industry as a whole sorting out its issues with streaming royalties.[72]
Criticism
Writing for USA Today's website in 2015, Micah Peters released a list of "3 reasons why Jay-Z's new Tidal streaming service is stupid".
Finances and royalties
In 2015, one artist stated that artist royalties per track from Aspiro/Tidal were then over three times those paid by Spotify, but that royalties may decrease to provide a sufficient return on investment.[79] Jay-Z commented in an interview to Billboard that artists would be paid more by being streamed on Tidal than with Spotify, stating "Will artists make more money? Even if it means less profit for our bottom line? Absolutely."[15] In the same interview, he also stressed the service was for people "lower down on the food chain".[15]
On February 27, 2016, Yesh Music, LLC and John Emanuele from the band The American Dollar launched a $5 million class-action lawsuit that claimed Tidal had to compensate the band for any of the royalty payments accrued from the streaming of the band's 116 copyrighted songs. The suit also accused Tidal of using faulty numbers to payout artists while also having undercut these same individuals by 35%. A response from Tidal stated that they were indeed fully up to date on all royalties for the group and had removed said intellectual property from their servers.[80][81]
Controversies
In January 2017, Norwegian newspaper Dagens Næringsliv ('Today's Business') reported that it had received internal documents disclosing lower subscriber counts than had been publicly announced by Tidal and its owners, having only 350,000 users in September 2015 (contradicting a claim by Jay-Z that the service had a million users), and 850,000 subscribers by March 2016, rather than the 3 million claimed by the service (which may have been inflated by including users that were using a free trial).[83][84]
In May 2018, Dagens Næringsliv published a report accusing Tidal of intentionally falsifying streaming numbers for Beyoncé's Lemonade and Kanye West's The Life of Pablo albums and consequently paying inflated royalties to the artists' record labels. The newspaper supported its report with a comprehensive study[85] from Norwegian University of Science and Technology's Center for Cyber and Information Security in Gjøvik. Variety reported, the music service, which "has rarely shared its data publicly", being the exclusive streaming platform for both albums, "claimed that West's album had been streamed 250 million times in its first 10 days of release in February of 2016, while claiming it had just 3 million subscribers – a claim that would have meant every subscriber played the album an average of eight times per day; and that Beyonce's album was streamed 306 million times in its first 15 days of release in April of 2016."
Model
See also
- Comparison of on-demand music streaming services
- List of Internet radio stations
- List of online music databases
External links
References
- Where TIDAL is Available TIDAL, October 25, 2024, retrieved November 18, 2025^
- Document SEC.gov, retrieved 2022-09-01^
- How Much Music is Available in TIDAL? retrieved January 24, 2022