When Jay Z unveiled his partners at the launch of his new streaming service Tidal on Monday afternoon, it looked as though he'd assembled the X Men (and women) of pop — and he was acting as the Professor Xavier.
The mission? To save the music business. Streaming sites such as Beats Music, Pandora, Rdio and especially Spotify have been identified as the future of music and are on the rise. Jay Z and his first tier of partners in Tidal (Alicia Keys, Arcade Fire, DeadMau5, Usher, Madonna, Kanye West, Beyoncé, Jack White, Jason Aldean, Chris Martin, Calvin Harris, Daft Punk and Nicki Minaj) are offering their rival platform, which offers higher sound quality, more content and prides itself on the idea that it will generate more royalty revenue for artists and writers.
This is in contrast to Spotify, which famously passes on a pitiful percentage of profits to writers and artists, causing financial difficulties not just for emerging acts but for more established ones, too. As Beck explained in a 2013 interview with the Argentine publication "Página/12," "If I were to have to try to make records and make them from the money that you get from Spotify, I wouldn't actually be able to make the records I'm making." It's worth remembering that his "Morning Phase" album won the Grammy for Album of the Year in February.
But Tidal feels doomed already, and the reason is the same as it ever was: price. Tidal is offering unlimited listening for $9.95 or $19.99 for higher quality audio. But when it comes to the idea of convincing fans to pay for music, the facts speak for themselves: Out of 60 million worldwide Spotify subscribers, only 15 million have splashed out for the monthly fee ($10 in the US). The rest use it for free and put up with the advertisements.
Trying to convince a 16-year-old to part with money has always been a tough sell, so the idea that fans might make the jump to subscribing out of good will is foolhardy. Even with the promise of "extra content," hearing this group of wealthy musicians promote a paid service for the overall health of a glamorous industry is unlikely to make teenagers with Saturday jobs fork out in droves.
The founders of Tidal are also under the misunderstanding that audiophiles like themselves (and their industry associates) are everywhere. It's true that most streaming and download sites offer a compressed sound, but the vast majority of consumers don't even notice the difference. Last year, Neil Young's PonoMusic service was set up with the idea of offering high quality audio, but that venture is already on rocky ground, with listeners preferring inferior iTunes MP3s in blind tests.
One selling point of Tidal is that users will be able to hear music offline and, as cheerily pointed out at the launch, New Yorkers will be able to listen on the subway. This fails to take into account that the MTA is steadily rolling out Wi-Fi across the system, and hundreds of millions of people in the US don't take the subway. That's right, Tidal — there are music lovers who live outside of New York, too!
The only option for this squad of music A-listers is to make like Taylor Swift and pull their music from the land of the free. Removing their catalog from Spotify et al is an aggressive act and earned Swift some criticism from her own fans when she did it in 2014, but it's already helped her last album, "1989," sell close to 5 million copies in the US in six months. But it already sounds like Jay Z is backing away from that option, stating in a Billboard interview that it's "not me against Spotify." But perhaps it should be.
For this new, artist-led Utopia to succeed, Spotify and the rest of the free streaming empire has to be humbled. The only way for Jay Z's X Men to prevail is to make a power play and force their fans to migrate to the supposedly more sustainable, artist-friendly world of Tidal. If Spotify didn't have the biggest artists in their music library, there would be less reason to use it. Taylor took a stand on her own (it's worth noting most of her work will be available on Tidal), so if these big-hitters are serious about standing up for their fellow musicians and raising the standard of what their fans hear, they need to do the same.
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