Tidal #TIDALforALL
Hi everyone. So
if a new streaming music service launched by some of the world's
best-known artists tries to rip off customers all around the world
did it really happen and did we really care?
Well that's what I'm asking myself about Tidal,
a brand new streaming music service which appears to be trying to gouge the
living crap
out of consumers. Brilliant job. So #TIDALforALL is a new music service being launched by
Jay-Z
and his pals. Madonna, Nicki Minaj
Chris Martin from Coldplay, you know lots of artistes who are generally these
days a bit irrelevant.
They're annoyed by the way. They're annoyed that
people like Spotify keep giving them small amounts of every stream and not
a whacking great chunk that they feel they deserve for their
brilliant creative contribution to society.
And so what they've decided to do is come up with a service
that provides FLAC streams which are uncompressed audio
for $20 a month. However
if you're in the UK or Europe guess what you're going to be charged?#TIDALforALL
You'll be charged £20 a month. What a
lovely way to do a pound to dollar conversion. Now
if this service Tidal was being consumer-friendly and
not just trying to rip everybody off around the world they would of course be
charging a reasonable amount for this.
They would be charging a pro-rata against that $20
fee. Actually in the UK this service should cost around £13.99
not £20. #TIDALforALL
Now these artists saying that they want to
double the amount that each artist gets from streaming services. OK,
so with Tidal they'd be paid twice as much
as Spotify. Now Spotify pays about 0.01p per stream so Jay-Z
is going to be getting 0.02p per stream. How exactly does that
add up to this £7 that we seem to be missing here from the price gouge
that's going to occur in Europe?
There is something very wrong with Tidal's value proposition here for
consumers. But let's also look at another issue. Tidal
If these ginormous music stars with
phenomenally large bank balances could drop $55 million
on a streaming service that provides FLAC you would think they
wouldn't be quite so concerned about the 0.01p they're getting from Spotify. #TIDALforALL
There's also the issue that these guys are all part of the biggest record
labels in the world
and if they wanted a better deal from their streaming service
perhaps they should go to their record company and tell the record company to stop
creaming off 95% of all the money.
But no because everything is about the dirty dirty consumers
and how wrong it is that we should expect fair value for a fair
proposition. I'm also going to make mention of a very simple fact here,
that FLAC as an uncompressed audio format these days,
is bloody worthless. It's pointless because
of digital upscaling that's available in a lot of hardware these
days. #TIDALforALL
Myself I have a sound bar downstairs that cost about £90
made by LG that can take any compressed audio format
and upscale it to around 1000 kbps,
essentially replacing the missing pieces of information removed from the compression
algorithm into mp3.
When I've done tests comparing FLAC to upscale mp3
nobody can tell the flippin difference so again
why am I being asked to pay £20 a month for something
that for the majority of people on modern hardware isn't going to make a blind bit of
difference? #TIDALforALL
It's a smoke and mirrors. It's an attempt by these overpaid, overpriced artistes
who are producing a content of low commercial quality these days
to try and bump-up their bank balances with what they perceive as an injustice. Tidal
It's not an injustice, it wasn't an injustice when
iTunes drove down the cost of albums for consumers
thus creating a marketplace where booming
audio sales could be seen to happen. It's not
wrong for Spotify to provide a service which starts to chip away at the piracy
problem and
converts people into paying customers at a reasonable price.
What #TIDALforALL is doing is just taking everybody for mugs.
These musicians seem to be so out of touch that they actually think that
people are going to buy this.
Well I certainly won't and I wouldn't recommend any of you give this the time of
day.
Tidal is not a service aimed at consumers. It's a service
aimed at making Jay-Z lots of money. That really is the long,
tall and short of it. #TIDALforALL