tidal
I have spent the majority of my life subscribing to the notion that Beyoncé is a faultless individual who only works to bring good into this cruel world. However, in recent days, I have had to remove my shield of Beyoncé naivete because of the controversy surrounding Tidal, a music streaming service that Beyoncé, Jay Z and many other very wealthy artists have been working to promote.
At first it was hard to come to the realization that Tidal wasn’t a superb music service, simply because the advertisements for it are astonishingly vague.
Take the Tidal ad on YouTube, for instance.
“Every great movement started with a group of people being able to get together and really just make a stand,” Beyoncé says as images of famous musicians, including Rihanna, Nicki Minaj and Madonna, are shown. The artists then go on to speak about the music industry and the change they are trying to institute. Madonna voices her opinions regarding “bringing humanity back to being an artist.”
The ad is so vague that it seems as if it could be selling a number of things or nothing at all. It plays out as if these musicians are going to make something amazing for the fans and allow music to be consumed in a truly nuanced way.
As it turns out, Tidal has not been the godsend the ad makes it out to be.
Tidal was made in order to put music back in the hands of the artists. It was meant to stop singers, producers and writers from suffering the consequences of free music downloading and streaming. Unlike Spotify or Rdio, Tidal does not provide a free option. On Tidal, users can pay $9.99 a month for “Premium” or $19.99 for “HiFi,” which offers a higher-quality sound.
It sounds like a good deal, and it makes sense to pay more money for a better product. However, the reality is that the “HiFi” option really only increases the sound quality if the user has the right high-tech headphones for listening to Tidal’s “lossless” audio, which plays at a higher bitrate.
This is where Tidal seems to have gone wrong. A huge demographic of listeners doesn’t have the funds to pay for higher-quality audio, especially if many listeners can’t even hear the difference. Plus, many feel that this small army of enormously successful artists has been using them as pawns to pay more for music.
With all these problems, it’s not surprising that Tidal hasn’t been faring too well. Earlier this month, Tidal lost its CEO, Andy Chen. Although Tidal was supposed to be a better alternative to Spotify and Pandora, the two music-streaming services are still dominating while Tidal’s sales decrease.
Jay-Z responded to the rocky start Sunday, posting a series of tweets using #TidalFacts. In the tweets, he claimed that “Tidal is doing just fine” and “The iTunes store wasn’t built in a day.” Whatever you say, Jay.
Accepting the fact that your idols might be manipulating you into funding their already supremely lavish lifestyle is pretty hard to do. I would like to think that the motives behind Tidal were all truly good and that the service will soon clean up its act.
Until then, I’ll be over here trying to forget that Beyoncé was ever involved.
