Just two weeks after Jay-Z introduced his Tidal streaming service, the interest has almost dropped out of site. With the share price escalating and then sliding, Tidal has caused a major ‘Pump and Dump’ on the Swedish Stock Exchange.
Premiered with a huge event that featured the artist/partners, which included Madonna, Daft Punk, Usher and Chris Martin, was touted as being the future of streaming. Artists have jumped on board with exclusives. Taylor Swift’s catalog, which had previously been pulled from Spotify, was included in the service, yet, few are showing a great deal of interest.
It’s unknown why there may be resistance to the service. It could be price. At $9.99 per month for standard and $19.99 per month for hi-def streaming, it is more expensive than any of the other services and, other than a short introductory period, it has no free option like giant Spotify.
The service has also come under fire from a number of other artists including Mumford and Sons, Lily Allen and Ben Gibbard of Death Cab For Cutie. Gibbard and Marcus Mumford criticized the lack of small artists in the initial rollout while Allen thought the price was too high and, combined with exclusives, will make people “swarm back to pirate sites”.
There also appears to be some internal strife as CEO Andy Chen left the company two-and-a-half weeks after the big announcement gala. Word was that between 12 and 25 other employees also left.
Just how bad is it? The actual subscriber numbers have not been announced but Billboard looked into the service ranking on the Apple market and it has fallen from a high of number 83 in the App store shortly after launch to completely out of the top 750 as of today.
It is still too early to tell if the service is a true bomb but they are going to have to make some big moves to turn it into the music powerhouse that was portrayed back in late March.
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