Shawn Carter (Jay Z) announced his new streaming service Tidal, a paid service for $9.99 per month that streams audio, music videos and sports, aiming to wipe out sites like YouTube, Pandora and Spotify.
Tidal is free but only for a month and if someone wanted access to it for more than a month than it would be $10 a month. For $20 a month users can get premium and every song will be in high quality. If you don’t have a premium account then every song is CD quality.
“$10 a month for music or paying nothing for music? Tough choice,” said Jason Hurst, Freshman.
Recently, Tidal has been struggling to stay popular. Tidal was in the Top-100 on the app store, but soon fell below number 750. Jay-Z has been tweeting out #tidalfacts to help it stay relevant. Some examples include how the service has gained over 770,000 subscribers in less than a month and how Tidal pays 75% of royalties to the artists involved.
Not everything that he tweeted about Tidal is necessarily true according to Time Magazine. Tidal was owned by a Swedish company called WiMP until Jay-Z bought it out earlier this year. Of the 770,000 members Jay-Z said they gained in a month, only 200,000 was actually gained, while the other 570,000 came from the initial release of Tidal back in Oct. 2014 when WiMP owned it. Also, he stated the iTunes Store was not built in one day even though that is true it still sold over 1,000,000 songs in just a week.
To promote Tidal even further Jay-Z has started a contest for Tidal users who make a playlist with the title and the hashtag #TIDALXJAYZ. If someone were to win they would get to go to a free Jay-Z concert. The concert will be exclusive to Tidal premium users and Jay-Z will play songs he does not normally perform at his regular concerts.
The price for Tidal premium has increased on the app store and is now $13 when it was originally $10 from the website.
Jay- Z and the other artists, such as Kanye West and Rihanna, will continue to promote Tidal and release exclusive music videos on the service.
