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Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Will Jay Z's Tidal service be washed away by Spotify?


“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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