Jay Z may be one of the undisputed kings of the music industry, but does his Midas touch extend to the streaming service Tidal? After spending two decades at the top of the rap game, give or take a retirement, Jay Z has also amassed a business empire: owning clubs, founding record companies, and clothing lines, but his foray into the world of music streaming may have been a step too far.
You may think Tidal, which Jay Z took over in March 2015, is actually more successful than it is. The fact that the service is never far away from music news means that it has a bigger public profile than its more successful competitors, but buzz doesn’t always mean money in the bank. Instead, Tidal has been in the news for many reasons, that range from embarrassing: the company lost $28 million last year, to questions of marketing: anything to do with the content and reaction to Beyoncé’s Lemonade, or downright bizarre.
The problems are simple, Tidal is a flawed beast that Jay Z will be hoping is too big to fail. At least in one aspect the company might have started a new streaming trend: the battle for album exclusives. Both Tidal, and Apple have had exclusive rights, for a limited time, to new releases. Tidal has had high profile exclusives from Rihanna’s Anti, Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo, and Beyoncé’s Lemonade. While all of these releases have brought new customers, and much needed revenue, the controversies behind them have had the effect of turning many music fans cynical. Kanye’s, let’s call it unique, ad campaign before the release of TLOP, exclusively on Tidal he never forgot to mention, all of which, had a certain desperation about it. He even went as far as tweaking some songs AFTER the album’s release, taking them off Tidal to work on them. The actions of a perfectionist? It can certainly be argued. An outside the box advertisement for Tidal? You bet your ass it was.
Which brings us to Lemonade, perhaps Tidal’s biggest success, which is no surprise since Beyoncé has had a license to print money for years. Yet this success came at the expense of Jay Z’s reputation, at least for a while. What may have been the greatest left-field PR move in the history of music: make an album about the friction in the relationship of music’s biggest couple, and start laughing all the way to the bank.
Despite all of the pyrotechnics, and thousands of column inches, Tidal is still far behind its main competitor Spotify. The fact that it only caters in one genre of music, means that it never will compete; with Spotify offering all kinds of music Tidal is only ever going to be a niche service. This set up isn’t built in a way that offers anything to new artists, unless you’re Kanye, Beyoncé, or Calvin Harris (who all now have shares in the company), there is no way to make a living off of it.
Tidal may well be built for success, but not in the way Jay Z originally envisioned it.
