It looks like Tidal is sinking before it even has a chance to swim.
There has been a lot of hype about the streaming music service called Tidal, which was purchased and re-launched by Jay Z last month. The service is touted as artist owned and claims to pay the highest percentage of royalties to music artists and songwriters out of all of the streaming music services.
Immediately after re-launch, the app cracked the U.S. iPhone top 20 download chart and things were looking great. Unfortunately, two weeks later, the app isn’t even in the top 700. Tidal does not currently offer any free subscriptions, like Pandora or Spotify do. A monthly subscription costs $9.99 for the standard premium service or $19.99 for the highest-quality service. Let’s be honest – these are by no means expensive options, but it shows consumers do not care about giving artists great royalties when it means they have to pay more.
To make matters even worse for Tidal, Pandora and Spotify downloads are surging again as they’ve climbed to numbers three and four on the U.S. iPhone revenue chart; the first time two music streaming services have simultaneously hit the top four in sales. Part of Tidal’s marketing plan was to bash its competitors, and it obviously backfired. Any negative media coverage about popular apps often ends up making them more appealing to consumers.
While I don’t like to see companies fail, this is good news from an advertising standpoint since Tidal does not offer commercial advertising. Is there any hope that Tidal’s numbers may rise again? Stay tuned.
