Tidal's Failure: A Reminder To Musicians That It's Not Easy To Build A Successful Streaming Service

from the seeeeee? dept

It's become commonplace in some parts of the legacy content industries to hate on basically any successful internet service that brings creative content to the public in a way that people actually like. We see attacks on Spotify, Netflix, Pandora and more for "not paying enough," and demands from those companies that they need to pay more. As we've noted, this often takes the form of trying to kill the golden goose. Almost always implicit in these discussions is the idea that the service itself is worthless and that all of the value comes from the content. That these services deserve to make any money at all is seen as some sort of insult to the copyright holders. The underlying belief here is that the service part is easy.

But, of course, that's wrong. Lots of services try and fail to capture the public's imagination. The content is important (and all of these services pay huge amounts of money -- often way more than half of their revenue to the copyright holders) but building a service people actually want to use is not an easy task. When those who think otherwise jump in and think they can simply "build their own" such service, you hope they would slowly start to understand this point.

You may recall that Jay-Z recently bought and relaunched a music streaming service, naming it Tidal. The whole rollout had severe issues, some of which Mike outlined in the post linked above (the lack of any free tier), and some issues I had myself that dovetail with Tidal's entire marketing platform. You see, Tidal's message was all about how artist-friendly it would be, working itself into a froth over being the anti-Pandora/Spotify/Whatever service, which were all demonized as not paying artists nearly enough money for their music. Which, fine, whatever, it's a message of a sort, I suppose. But to roll that message out with marketing ads featuring insanely wealthy musicians in designer clothes all getting together to talk about ushering in a new service designed to generate more money for themselves (and perhaps newer artists too)? Look, there's nothing wrong with being rich, but that's just bad PR.

And, after the first several weeks since its debut, it seems like Tidal is less a wave and more a ripple.
Tidal is now the 50th most popular music app in the iTunes store, and doesn't even crack the top 700 overall. Any hot new app will see a big drop in downloads after the hype from its launch dies down, but it doesn't look like Tidal was all that hot to begin with. It briefly peaked at #19 overall before falling out of the top 200 less than two weeks later.

Meanwhile, its competitors are surging: Pandora is at #7, Spotify is at #34, and Beats Music just broke the top 50. Even circa-2013 Spotify challenger Rdio is seeing more downloads than Tidal this week.
Not a good showing, especially given all of the star-power behind it. But let's not treat this by dancing on any freshly dug graves. That would be premature anyway, since we are only talking about a couple of weeks worth of market time here. Regardless of that fact, what this should do is teach some artists an important lesson about the difficulty of providing a music streaming platform, the market forces that decided the winners and losers, and the value that a good streaming service brings both to customers and to artists alike.

The whole campaign against Pandora and Spotify has been insane since the very beginning. Streaming services that provide a useful way for customers and potential customers to find, listen to, and to become fans of artists and their work were demonized as greedy technocratic regimes designed solely to make sure singers didn't have enough bus-fare to get home at night. That was silly, of course, as one look at the amount of income those streaming services generate versus what artists wanted in terms of royalties, but the whole thing was really begging for a "If you think it's so easy, come up with your own service" rebuttal. Jay-Z tried to take this on. It's starting to look like he failed.

Failure is okay, but only if you learn from it. The very thing that Tidal failed to offer is what makes the other services so popular.
Some of Tidal’s problems were apparent to anyone who is not a wealthy member of the illuminati or close personal friend of Jay Z: its main value proposition was that, for only 10 dollars a month more than you’re paying for Spotify—that’s just two Starbucks lattes!—you can feed and clothe the famous multimillionaires you see on your screen. But it also had some less obvious flaws, like a very shittily-designed app with broken search functionality and a marketing message—attacking those other, non-artist-benefitting streaming services—that seems to have helped Spotify more than it helped Tidal.
Combined with no free tier, the single selling point for Tidal appeared to be appealing to the masses to use a service that pays artists more money than the others. It didn't work. Not because people do not want artists to succeed, but because the other services work better than Tidal and the artists pimping Tidal did nothing to connect with customers. It was a plea, entirely one-sided, with nothing additional offered to the customer. That's the lesson: streaming services aren't as easy to do as these artists thought. Now let's see if they do anything with that lesson.
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Filed Under: innovation, jay-z, streaming music
Companies: tidal


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  • This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it
    identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 1 May 2015 @ 10:58am

    So... YOU CAN'T COMPETE WITH FREE?

    HA, HA! This proves Masnick WRONG!

    GOTCHA. GOTCHA A MILLION TIMES!


    Less seriously: Geez, give it a chance. If money holds out -- and why shouldn't it? streaming is practically free, says Masnick -- then it may yet prosper.

    This hit piece so soon smacks of tacitly favoring, oh, Spotify, as one of the NEW gatekeepers.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 1 May 2015 @ 11:02am

    So... YOU CAN'T COMPETE WITH FREE?

    HA, HA! This proves Masnick WRONG!

    GOTCHA. GOTCHA A MILLION TIMES!


    Less seriously: Geez, give it a chance. If money holds out -- and why shouldn't it? streaming is practically free, says Masnick -- then it may yet prosper.

    This hit piece so soon smacks of tacitly favoring, oh, Spotify, as one of the NEW gatekeepers.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • icon
      Gwiz (profile), 1 May 2015 @ 11:17am

      Re: So... YOU CAN'T COMPETE WITH FREE?

      So... YOU CAN'T COMPETE WITH FREE?

      HA, HA! This proves Masnick WRONG!



      Not at all. You have be a special type of moron to think that this proves you can't compete with free.

      Spotify, Pandora and Beats are doing a fine job of competing with free. Tidal is having trouble competing with those services.

      link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Anonymous Coward, 1 May 2015 @ 11:17am

      Re: So... YOU CAN'T COMPETE WITH FREE?

      Or maybe it smacks of saying that without taking the userbase of streaming music services into account, Tidal set itself for failure.

      Which it did by not offering at least a “free” (read: ad-supported), entry-level version of its service. It also tried to compete in a space crowded by competitors (e.g. Rdio, Spotify, Google’s own music offerings) with nothing that made it stand out—well, besides the notion of higher royalty payments for artists, anyway.

      Tidal coulda been a contender, but the people behind its rebirth got damn near everything wrong. You don’t need to endorse Spotify or Rdio or whatever to say that.

      link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Just Another Anonymous Troll, 1 May 2015 @ 11:23am

      Re: So... YOU CAN'T COMPETE WITH FREE?

      Just because something fails does not mean it failed due to piracy. Tidal couldn't compete with less expensive, better designed services, not free. Just give up already out_of_the_blue.

      link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Anonymous Coward, 1 May 2015 @ 12:16pm

      Re: So... YOU CAN'T COMPETE WITH FREE?

      You're an idiot.

      Tidal thought that it offered a better service than its competitors. The market decided that it didn't.

      That's it.

      link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Anonymous Coward, 1 May 2015 @ 12:36pm

      Re: So... YOU CAN'T COMPETE WITH FREE?

      The usual troll with the usual agenda. You've been asked before if you dislike the message of this so bad, why you stay. You bring no valid points into the discussion other than your own warped ideas. That is plainly a waste of e-ink.

      Tidal offered nothing to make itself stand out other than a higher cost to the users. Higher costs are rarely a selling point that finds favor in the market without some sort of benefit for the extra charge.

      link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Anonymous Coward, 1 May 2015 @ 12:51pm

      Re: So... YOU CAN'T COMPETE WITH FREE?

      If you offer a shitty product and charge too much, you can't compete with anything.

      link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Anonymous Coward, 1 May 2015 @ 3:11pm

      Re: So... YOU CAN'T COMPETE WITH FREE?

      Do you know what a "hit piece" is?

      link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    avideogameplayer, 1 May 2015 @ 11:06am

    This might another underlying reason that people pirate...

    It's one thing to support a starving artist, but another to feed the piggy bank of millionaires who have more money than brains...

    So A for effort, but F for attitude...

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Just Another Anonymous Troll, 1 May 2015 @ 11:30am

    How can these services fail? Don't they just steal money from the musicians and help pirates and get paid for it all?
    /sarc

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 1 May 2015 @ 11:37am

    ALSO a launch featuring ,jayz , madonna,
    they are the top 1 per cent ,
    These people would consider a millionaire to be not well off,
    a low earner.
    Also streaming hd music doesnt help unless you are listening to it on pro level stereo, system or expensive headphones .
    See itunes,ipod,
    standard mp3s are fine for most people ,they use less bandwidth ,storage space .
    This is a streaming service designed by the 1 per cent .
    they are all multimillionaires .

    The main result of tidal seems to be more publicity for spotify and pandora .

    Maybe They,ll explain the royalty rates and how it will help new bands ,
    all those singers ,madonna et al
    grew popular in the age of the million selling cd .
    When the internet was just being born.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    Rhiadon (profile), 1 May 2015 @ 1:48pm

    It OBVIOUSLY is failing because nobody wants streaming music.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    any moose cow word, 1 May 2015 @ 1:59pm

    The message I get from this is that services such as Spotify and Pandora that actually pay artists are evil and the legacy studios that artists pay far lower rates, which they usually manage to weasel out off, are the good guys.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      any moose cow word, 1 May 2015 @ 2:04pm

      Re:

      And that fans who use services that actually pay artists are bastards who don't want artists to be paid.

      link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 1 May 2015 @ 3:08pm

    Easy now on the conclusions!

    We have barely seen a month worth of real data. While Tidal is competing with Pandora and Spotify, they are also relying on a lack of ad-financed tier and therefore that large segment. Ad-financed tiers are what is used as the honeytrap and thus advertisement not only for the ad-buyers but also the service. Without that their numbers will naturally be significantly lower than their competitors without it meaning much for their economy, necessarily.

    The real question is if they will be able to make good on their promise of distributing as large a degree of the money? It already sounds like Jay-Z is moving the target from 3x Spotify compensation to 2x Spotify compensation and with Spotify increasing their payout, even that goal may need adjustment.

    In the long run, the selling points seems to have been a bit optimistic on the service. But let us see if they are still around after 6 months. Then we can start to see if they have actually created something better for the artists or something that is just another music service. So far it seems like the latter if they can even survive.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • icon
      John Fenderson (profile), 4 May 2015 @ 7:47am

      Re:

      "The real question is if they will be able to make good on their promise of distributing as large a degree of the money?"

      From the reports I've been seeing, the real question is if they will be able to make their app not suck completely.

      link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Whoever, 3 May 2015 @ 12:24pm

    More expensive

    So its main selling point was that it was more expensive than the competition, yet it failed? I am soooo shocked.

    Perhaps these rich musicians are so out of touch with reality that they don't realize who ultimately provides their income.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 2 Mar 2016 @ 1:04am

    out_of_the_blue just hates it when due process is enforced.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Harald K, 14 Sep 2016 @ 4:10am

    A year and some months later, Tidal is in trouble for not paying its bills. Jay Z thought Spotify was just lazy and greedy in not paying his multimillionaire buddies what they "deserve".

    Now they're failing to pay their caterers, their taxi drivers and the indie labels foolish enough to trust them.

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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