While it remains to be seen whether or not Tidal, Jay-Z’s much-hyped Spotify killer, will save the music business the way its co-owners, which includes the likes of Kanye West and Beyonce, promise it will, the launch of the app has revealed certain truths about the music business in 2015.
Namely, it’s proven that no one wants Tidal. As Tone Deaf reported earlier this month, if Tidal is to secure better revenue for its partner artists it has to be a runaway success, surpassing even the dominance of stalwarts like Spotify and Pandora. Tidal’s doing a pretty lousy job of achieving that goal.
As BGR reports, two weeks after Tidal briefly cracked the US iPhone top 20 download chart, following a heavily publicised launch in New York City that was not unlike what a meeting of the Illuminati would look like, the app has crashed out of the top 700.
It seems American consumers have little sympathy towards co-owners like Calvin Harris and Nicki Minaj, who have estimated net worths of $46 Million and $50 million, respectively. Indeed, many cited an image problem as one of Tidal’s primary flaws – no one wants to hear mega-celebrities complain about money woes.
Even mega-celebrities agreed, with musicians like Marcus Mumford and Death Cab For Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard coming out to criticise the way struggling independent musicians were seemingly a non-factor in Tidal’s plot to put revenue back into the pockets of musicians.
Shortly after Tidal’s launch, the company’s CEO and several other staff members were given the boot as part of a “streamlining” push. As BGR notes, new CEO Peter Tonstad, a former consultant for the Norwegian Ministry of Environment, certainly has his work cut out for him.
If pressing image issues weren’t enough, to make matters worse, Tidal’s rivals are doing better than ever. On 20th April, Pandora and Spotify gained the No. 3 and No. 4 positions on the US iPhone revenue chart, respectively – the first time two music streaming services hit the top four simultaneously.
In order to achieve this, Pandora and Spotify, the two services effectively dominating the streaming market, had to push the app store juggernaut that is Candy Crush Saga out of the US iPhone revenue chart, which is a remarkable feat by anybody’s standards.
Tidal, meanwhile, sits well behind a QR Reader and dodgy apps offering users access to free music downloads. What’s more, Tidal’s aggressive marketing campaign could even be to blame. Not long after Tidal began bashing Spotify’s allegedly meagre payouts, Spotify shot back into the iPad Top 40 download chart.
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This hadn’t happened since November 2014 and it happened right as Tidal’s anti-Spotify rhetoric hit fever pitch. For all intents and purposes, it looks as though Tidal’s attacks on Spotify and Pandora have actually managed to increase public awareness of the services.
Instead of boosting the profile of Tidal, the incredible star power behind Jay-Z’s Spotify killer actually boosted the profile of Spotify, and helped the streaming giant to hit a new milestone. Adding insult to injury, Beats Music has started cracking the US iPhone top 20 revenue chart.
It’s not the first time this has happened. BGR recounts several cases in which negative coverage of popular apps actually helped them become mainstream, including Twitter, which received hostile news coverage, and Snapchat, which was the subject of several sexual panic reports in the US media.
This obviously puts Tidal’s new CEO in a difficult position. He must now somehow find a way to get people interested in Tidal without bashing its deep-pocketed and powerful competitors or asking people to sympathise with a cabal of multimillionaires.
