Jay-Z’s interest in Tidal appeared to wane, eventually selling a majority stake to Square (the mobile payment company set up by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey) in March 2021 for $297 million. West was even quicker to end his Tidal exclusive, releasing The Life Of Pablo on multiple streaming services in April 2016. Jay-Z eventually broke his own exclusives rule and returned his music to Spotify in 2019. (Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for Roc Nation) gettyĭespite the high-profile names and incredible levels of media hype, Tidal did not become the blockbuster service it was aspiring to be. Cole onstage at the Tidal launch event #TIDALforALL at Skylight at Moynihan Station on Main New York City. NEW YORK, NY - MARCH 30: (L-R) Usher, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Madonna, Deadmau5, Kanye West, JAY Z. This was a release he returned to and reworked several times by adding and subtracting tracks, meaning it existed in a constant state of flux for listeners. Many of these marquee artists offered up exclusives, notably Beyoncé’s Lemonade album and West’s own Life Of Pablo album. Major names like Beyoncé, Rihanna, Daft Punk, Madonna, Deadmau5, Jack White and West himself were given stakes in the service and it was presented as an “artist-owned” vehicle that would pay higher streaming rates. This was the relaunch name of niche Scandinavia streaming service WiMP when Project Panther Bidco (fronted by Jay-Z) acquired it in 2015 for $54 million. He statement could also be a subtle diss aimed at Tidal. There is no uniform royalty rate for artists in the streaming world, just as there was no uniform deal in the days of CDs and LPs. His claim that artists get “just 12% of the money the industry makes” in streaming is simply too opaque to be really helpful.Īrtist streaming royalty rates will different enormously depending on the deal they have with their record label, if that deal has been renegotiated, if they are recouped or not (and labels are moving to change the recoupment imbalance), if they are on a major or an independent label, if they are self-releasing, if they are using a label services company and so on. West’s claim about Stem Player paying artists better and musicians wrestling back control from the established streaming services is as invigorating as it is vague. PHOTO: BRITTA PEDERSEN/dpa | usage worldwide (Photo by Britta Pedersen/picture alliance via Getty Images) picture alliance via Getty Images CES, the world's largest annual consumer technology trade show runs from 06 to 09 January 2015 and is expected to feature 3,500 exhibitors showing off their latest products and services to about 150,000 attendees. display during the 'ShowStoppers' event at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, 06 January 2015. Now, however, multiple services are offering high-resolution streaming as standard.Ī music player 'Pono player 2' by manufacturer Pono Music, founded by musician Neil Young, is on. At the time, this audiophile strategy was swimming against the general tide of streaming which was more about convenience than sound. Artist empowerment was a happy byproduct of Pono’s central idea, but Young was really selling it as being about enhanced sonics for the listener. What was a phenomenal success initially as a Kickstarter project back in 2014, raising over $6 million in pledges to get it off the ground, seemed to steadily run out of steam thereafter. In that sense, the ghost of Neil Young’s Pono player raises its head. He is positioning Stem Player as being about artist empowerment over and above fan interactivity. This makes the moves here by West all the more intriguing. It was fine for a competition or a piece of interactive fan marketing, but it was never going to travel far outside of that. That said, this was, by definition, an incredibly niche activity and was never going to be a dominant way of consuming music. There was also a brief flurry of activity around browser-based interactive remixing, presenting it as a new type of musical format, with MXP4 being one of the better known examples. This all has echoes of trends from the early 2000s when acts would release stems of tracks and offer them out to fans usually as part of a remix competition, with Radiohead being one of the biggest acts to experiment here several times. The twist with the player is that it lets users interact with the tracks as they play them, with four channels that can turn up or down different parts of the track (using the stems) to get the particular sound they want.
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