“We didn’t like the direction music was going and thought maybe
we could get in and strike an honest blow and if, you know, the very least we
did was make people wake up and try to improve the free v paid system, and promote
fair trade, then it would be a win for us anyway.”
That’s Jay
Z in Billboard, explaining the logic behind Tidal, the streaming
service he officially launched on 30 March. There’s more to it than that,
though a big chunk of it is about trying to get people to pay for music again.
There’s also, for example, Jay Z’s desire to make Tidal a sort of creative
salon, where “artists come here and start making songs that are 18 minutes
long, or whatever. I know this is going to sound crazy, but maybe they start
attempting to make a Like a Rolling Stone.” Bravely, Jay Z suggested “this
platform will allow art to flourish”.
Except, when you log in to Tidal – it’s
very early days yet, admittedly – what you get is another streaming site. There
are videos at the top of the home page (including an “exclusive” of Daft Punk’s
70-minute film Electroma, which only counts as exclusive if
you ignore the fact that you can find it on YouTube), rather than artists,
albums or tracks, but it’s not all that different from Spotify. It offers
higher quality sound – CD quality, lossless FLAC, rather than MP3 – which has
set some of the audiophiles quivering, but it’s worth thinking carefully about
whether that’s really worth £20 a month (it’s half price for a lower-quality
service, with no free option). As Stephen Witt explains in his excellentforthcoming
book about the MP3
revolution, How Music Got Free, lots of research shows the human ear is pretty
much incapable of detecting the elements of sound that MP3 files shave off –
the average piece of music contains far too much information for us to actually
process. Most of the promises made about the best possible sound are the sonic
equivalent of promising you the biggest Sunday newspaper ever: yes, but you’re
still throwing away six sections without even looking at them. Even those
who believe in the virtues of high-quality audio say you’ll need high-end kit to notice
the benefits.
The size of Tidal’s
library is pretty decent – 25m tracks and 75,000 music videos – though with
some oddities. There are, as always with streaming services, things missing. But
there are also things I wouldn’t have expected to find – as I type this, I’m
listening to an unofficial recording of Bruce Springsteen playing at the Roxy
in LA on 7 July 1978.
There are exclusive playlists, some of which have star
compilers. Jack White’s selection of what’s playing at Third Man studios is, as
you’d expect, a potluck haul of garage rock, vintage R&B and rock’n’roll.
Tidal staff’s own playlist of Antipodean indie is fun, and an insight into the
breadth of the site’s catalogue. But Coldplay’s playlist of songs that made the
band has the feeling of something knocked together in 10 minutes by the work
experience kid – Bob Marley, Oasis, Radiohead, U2. If you’re going to get star
playlists, they have to be revelatory. The whole point is to change perceptions
rather than reinforce them.
So, as a user experience it’s perfectly
fine, if not revolutionary. But would you want to pay twice as much for it as
you do for Spotify, if you even pay for Spotify?
The fact is – as Witt’s book title makes plain – people perceive music as
something you no longer have to pay for. In Billboard, Jay Z made the
comparison with water: it’s something you can get for free, but for which
people are willing to pay. But the comparison doesn’t work: the bottled water
companies have managed to persuade the public they offered something better,
but the paid-for music companies have completely lost that battle. One of the
reasons teenagers walk around with £2 bottles of water is that they no longer
pay for anything they listen to.
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