TIDAL, the music streaming service founded by Jay-Z and supported by a who’s who of the richest folk in music today, has proven to be a mammoth failure, dropping out of the top 700 downloaded apps in the US iOS App Store chart. It turns out that Joe and Jill Public weren’t concerned by how services such as Spotify are harming the wallets of the likes of Nicki Minaj, Kanye West and Rihanna.
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The streaming platform, which was set up in order to be of benefit to musicians who deem the percentage Spotify pays out to artists unacceptable, was rather unfortunately announced with the backing of several of Jay-Z’s multi-millionaire friends, who basically took to a stage in order to tell you why you should pay more money to stream music in order to ensure that they get more money. It was a weird event, and was roundly criticised, making its failure relatively unsurprising. What is surprising, though, is how quickly it’s failed.
After being announced last month, the app quickly and inevitably shot into the top 20 of the iOS downloads chart. Now it’s fallen completely out of the top 700 downloads, a huge drop that even its most vehement of naysayers presumably wouldn’t have predicted.
This news comes after TIDAL’s CEO was removed from the company last week in order to “streamline” the company. That’s industry speak for “we’ve put a shitload of money into this thing that no one wants, so we’re putting people on the unemployment line before we inevitably shut the whole thing down.”
Hilariously, the service has actually increased the number of downloads of its key rivals, Pandora and Spotify. The two have now moved up to 3rd and 4th place in the download charts.
So what will become of TIDAL? Too much money has been pumped into this thing for it to be immediately abandoned, and there are a plethora of egos at stake, so it’s unlikely that it will be shut down within the year despite it likely losing a lot of people a LOT of money. And who knows, maybe Jay-Z can eventually convince us to feel some sort of sympathy for his multi-millionaire friends, and we’ll dip into our wallets in order to help fund Nicki Minaj’s golden-plated yacht. Or maybe not.
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