Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Streaming What HiFi announces Tidal available on Sooloos in 'early 2015'

An article about Tidal arguing that Lemonade may not help Tidal survive. Sadly there is no mention of the fact that Tidal streams CD quality to differentiate it from Spotify...

Can Beyonce save Tidal?

Mmm Interesting! Rumor: Apple deliberately delayed Tidal app updates to help Beats Music relaunch.

Looks like it's gloves off time with those nasty post Jobs era people at Apple. Maybe this is the sort of thing they have to do now their previous cutting edge has been severely blunted by the absence of Jobs and iPhone sales are rightly plummeting (thanks Samsung S7, LG G5, HTC 10 etc.) with a resulting profits drop of a whopping 13% Apple revenue falls for first time since 2003. .

Clearly the (almost) exclusive streaming rights Jay Z has to both Beyonce (and don't forget the recently deceased) Prince's work is starting to trouble it's closest competitor Apple Music (forget Spotify they're over the hills and far away with 30M subscribers).

I suppose we have to wait a few weeks yet to see how much extra traction there has been with the recent massive increase in TIDAL Subscribers for the Beyonce & Prince releases. The purple one's unfortunate death will keep people re-visiting his work for some time yet and will be further sustained when the (no doubt) stream of re-hashed greatest hits, 2 for 1s etc hit the (digital) shelves, but artists like Beyonce only produce something every few years which doesn't lead to the required levels of sustainability Mr Z seeks for TIDAL.

Maybe now though we can understand the almost indecent haste with which Apple got into the Music streaming business proper!

Tidal: can Prince and Beyonce save the underdog of streaming services?

A follow on piece from the Guardian to the one posted above by Jack D that goes into more much much detail and posits the theory that Samsung will indeed eventually purchase TIDAL which will result in Mr Z becoming a billionaire!!

Could this have all just been a game with the recent exclusives resulting in temporary massive hikes in subscribers done to whet the Samsung boards' appetite further?

Rather tellingly, I'm reminded of his quote from last year

Quote

I'm a business, man not a businessman

One of the drawbacks of renting music.

Really disheartening. Much of the discussion in the Guardian article was about artists "windowing" but not one mention of sound quality related to streaming. We are really a tiny minority. The rest of the world doesn't seem to care.

You're right on that one. The world TIDAL now operates in is clearly radically different to the world of cutting edge tech/HIFi that Aspiro/WIMP et al were at the forefront of in recent years.

Who knows what will happen when(if?) Samsung do take over as I guess they'll only be interested in quantity rather than quality? They'll probably see the Premium Service as off-putting to their new client demographic, forgetting (as every single news item bar one reported on here) that Premium service subscribers bring in twice as much Income as the bog-standard service subscribers and therefore are worth keeping

Not sure that Samsung do niche?

TIDAL or whatever it's renamed as will probably just become a freebie Samsung phone App that you can only access if you buy one of their admittedly excellent phones!

The high quality service would probably stick around since it's already in place. Serving up MQA files could be dropped from their roadmap though.

Beyonce's 'Lemonade' Brought 306 Million Global Streams to Tidal

Beyonce and Jay Z milk the rewards as Lemonade album earns Tidal 306 million streams

Wow! That's a lot of 'Global Streams'. Not quite sure what they are though and how they equate to new subscribers. Can anyone enlighten me?

DRAKE’S “VIEWS” FINALLY LANDS ON JAY Z’S TIDAL, APPLE’S COMPETITION

What goes around comes around!

The gloves are off Part 2!

9 reasons Tidal is so doomed, not even Jay-Z can save it

Mild mannered (Peter) Parker Hall from those fine fellows at Digital Trends has written a very damning piece about TIDAL today.

The piece contains some pretty out there claims and the only positive thing to note is that they are confirming Queen Bey brought in 1.2 million new TIDAL subscribers which at least answers my question in the previous post. (i.e. what 306M streams equates to in subscribers).

So the 'attacks' continue then. An Apple Music sponsored piece I hear you ask, well perhaps, but take a look at some other prominent articles on the site, which may suggest otherwise

Spotify’s growing faster than ever, thanks in part to Apple Music , Spotify ventures further into video territory with twelve star-studded shows.

But most of all this bad/old energy press seem agitated with Tidal for having exclusive content and releases. And being owned by rich artists.

Do we care? Not really, I'm happy if they have the same content as the other services and if they release the full HD Beyonce video for us paying subscribers, then why not, we payed for it. The others didn't.

Tidal has been "Doomed" ever since the re-launch and it will probably be around next year as well with more content, MQA Hires service and the other streaming services will still scratch their head, "why are they still around?". Well we want quality streaming and technically good and stable service. I have to say that I'm pleased with Tidal regarding that.

Sure we can all appreciate even faster releases and even more diversified content. But it's good enough at this point. And for us SQ-interested, they are the first to actually implement true bit-perfect playback in their clients. The other services didn't care about this.

So for SQ they are the #1 streaming leader at this point and that caters to us music lovers with systems that enjoys the highest audio quality.

Do we know if they are profitable or not? If they are profitable (and let's face it, every TIDAL customer is a paying customer), then everything the naysayers say is completely moot. If they are not profitable, that's a different story.

The dogs bark but the caravan moves on 😎