Tidal, Great Investment Or Disaster?

Tidal; Great Investment Or Sinking Ship? Our experts weigh in and compare Tidal to Apple Music, and Spotify

On March 30, 2015 recording artist and businessman Sean Carter (better known as Jay Z) launched his highly anticipated business venture “Tidal”. The launch nearly broke the Internet as many high profile artist (Beyoncé’ Kanye West, J Cole, to name a few) firmly stood by Carter and signed their names to Tidal contracts on the day of the launch.

Tidal operates as an online streaming service, much like competitors Apple Music and Spotify. Below are an analysis on what the three offer, how it operates, and which is the most efficient.

Apple music

Apple Music is finally here and it looks like a cross between SoundCloud, Spotify and a local radio station. Here’s how it works:

Cost: $9.99 or $14.99 for a family package

Apple has gone with a standard pricing method just as its competitors Tidal and Spotify, who also offer a subscription at $9.99. For $14.99 you can have six family members under the same account, with each person having access to their own profile. Apple Music features over 30 million tracks.

Tidal

Tidal has a superstar roster of supporters and shareholders with 2 mega-star CEO’s (Jay Z and Lil Wayne). Tidal however is not Jay Z’s invention. The tech company Aspiro, which was acquired by Jay Z’s company earlier this year for the large sum of 56 million dollars. Here are Tidal’s prices:

Cost: $9.99 or $19.99 for the premium tier

Tidal costs $9.99 a month for the standard service and $19.99 for the ‘premium’ service. Tidal’s high-fidelity sound is only available on the premium tier; this means that for $19.99 you’ll be able to listen to music at the highest CD quality. If you’re listening on a smartphone, you’ll need a device with decent digital-to-analogue conversion or ‘DAC’. Most of the latest top-end handsets have decent DAC and support 24-bit/192kHz music playback. You’ll also need a good pair of headphones to bring out the most of Tidal’s high-fidelity sound.

Spotify

Spotify the obvious figurehead of the music streaming industry having streamed its first track back in 2008. Now, it has over 60 million users, with 15 million paying subscribers. It’s the largest and most well-known music streaming service around. Here’s how Spotify Operates:

Cost: free, $4.99 and $10

Spotify has three types of accounts, free, family and premium. The free option operates like this: It’s ‘free’ in the sense that there’s no upfront cost but you’ll have to pay by listening to intermittent adverts if you access it on a mobile or tablet. However, on mobile, you can only listen to pre made playlists, skip six tracks per hour and you can’t listen anything on-demand or offline. The premium and family options give users full access to all of Spotify’s functions. The only difference is that family members of a premium tier subscriber get a 50% discount. There’s also a 10% student discount available.

After comparing the 3 Spotify seems to be the obvious choice and leader in the world of streaming music. However, Jay Z plans to sway things towards Tidal’s direction by “putting the power back into artist hands,” claiming Tidal will pay artist more royalties and they earn all rights when releasing via Tidal. Smart. Meanwhile, Singer Taylor Swift blasted Apple for not paying the artist for their 3 day trial period, which eventually forced the company to change its philosophy on the 3 day trial period.

In addition to this streaming tug of war Tidal lost out on Drake, who might be the biggest hip hop artist out right now and also its interim CEO. What does this mean for the company? Is Tidal a good investment or a disaster? You decide.