
Tidal’s biggest mistake appears to be that they never understood how hard it was given that they were the fourth entrant into the space. And, at $19.99 a month, the price point for better audio is prohibitively high, where users have been conditioned to be able to listen to music for free, or at most, $9.99 a month. Those that do might not have the appropriate headphones that can actually capture the higher quality audio. In addition, Higher quality audio is not that great of a selling point. While some users may pay for the earliest access, most will not. And, as we have seen as of late, artists rarely stay on one service exclusively for long, knowing that the small financial gains per stream dictate a strategy of having your music available everywhere.
TIDAL ARTIST LIST DOWNLOAD
Users are not beholden to Tidal for songs, and they can still listen to their favorite artists on other platforms, or, find a way to illegally download the song elsewhere. Unfortunately, this missed the point that users multi-home streaming services, especially when ones are available for free, and are happy to wait to listen. Tidal also hoped that its exclusive content would attract users. As a new, and late entrant, scale becomes very difficult to achieve for Tidal, made even more daunting by its smaller geographic footprint than its rivals.


This is due to the high fixed cost nature of the business, meaning scale is the only way to reach profitability. Spotfiy, which has a much larger user base, pays artists less than Tidal and has never been able to make a profit. First, the cost structure of this model is not scalable. It hoped that its artist-first ownership and royalty model (it reported to pay the highest royalties of any music streaming platform), was meant to be an attraction to gaining top talent that would then entice user subscription. Looking at how Tidal wanted to create value, it becomes clear why the platform struggled. 4 However, the success was extremely short-lived, and the platform quickly fell out of the top 700 apps within two weeks. The platform stated that it gained 100K subscribers just from the announcement of the artist co-owner list and catapulted to the Top 20 of the U.S. The immediate aftermath of the announcement seemed to prove the re-launch a success.
TIDAL ARTIST LIST SERIES
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Spotify filed for an IPO last week, and analysts report that the offering will give the company a $23BN valuation on the back of 71 million paying subscribers and more than 159 million MAUs. While the streaming wars of online video have become a widely discussed topic, music streaming is not far behind.
