For subscribers paying US$9.20 per month (depending on your subscription) for access to Tidal, here is founder Jay Z going 8 Mile on his competitors.
I don’t want to sound unprofessional, but this seems like the start of a smear campaign if I have ever seen one. Reported by Time, Jay Z has been making some statements on Twitter about Tidal and why it’s riding a wave of success, or so he says.
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Jay Z seems to be all about the artist and the music, his rap seems to highlight the big corporates as the current big fish and now the league of extraordinarily rich & famous musicians need to band together to fight for their rights to the rights for more money.
Jay Z relaunched Tidal on a wave of celebrity mega-stars, with a video which tried to make ultra-stars look less like a bunch of ridiculous artists and more like business individuals. This reminds me of a team in South Park, The Super Best Friends, teaming up to fight for more control over the listeners. If you haven’t heard, Spotify is kind of a big deal around here, they are worth billions and have a Monopoly over the entire industry. Perhaps this isn’t a money game like Monopoly, maybe this is a game of chess where artists need to think of how to strategically supply their music, not sell themselves. Ben Gibbard (singer for Death Cab for Cutie) told the Business Insider a very valid point:
I think they totally blew it by bringing out a bunch of millionaires and billionaires and propping them up onstage and then having them all complain about not being paid. If I had been Jay Z, I would have brought out ten artists that were underground or independent and said, these are the people who are struggling to make a living in today’s music industry.
The whole point of me going onto the Internet and downloading my music for free is because well, it’s for free. Just because I am now paying directly into Jay Z’s account, doesn’t change anything and the fact that all these really successful artists couldn’t see this, shows me what the brain storm session was like for Tidal. Where is the little guy in all of this, congratulations Jay Z, you have the biggest names in industry with you but that’s so boring my brain might ooze out my left ear. Give me someone hand picked from the mountains whose yodeling has sculpted the voice of an angel. I want another Bieber story, not fricken Madonna again.
