On his Kingdom Come album, Jay Z talked about being a big star “befo’ Steve Jobs made the iPod.”
Now, close to a decade later, the hip-hop mogul is keen to show that he is still ahead of Apple by introducing his new streaming music rival to Spotify and Pandora, prior to Apple’s own rumored Beats Music rebrand.
Jay Z introduced the “owners” of the Tidal music service Monday at an event in the rapper’s hometown of New York City. Those with a financial stake in Tidal include (deep breath) Jay and his wife Beyonce, Alicia Keys, Daft Punk, Kanye West, Usher, Deadmaus, Madonna, Rihanna, Jason Aldean, Nicki Minaj, Win Butler and Régine Chassagn of Arcade Fire, Chris Martin of Coldplay, J. Cole, Jack White and Calvin Harris.
Taking to the stage, Keys called it “The first-ever artist-owned global music and entertainment platform.”
Tidal is priced at $9.99 per month for regular-quality streams, or a premium $19.99 for a high-resolution service. Jay Z reportedly acquired the Swedish company for $56 million.
In a new interview with Billboard, Jay Z shared his thoughts on fellow hip-hop entrepreneur Jimmy Iovine, who joined Apple as part of the $3 billion Beats acquisition. Specifically Jay revealed how he tried to recruit Iovine to help Tidal compete against whatever Apple’s planning:
“My thing with Jimmy is, ‘Listen, Jimmy; you’re Jimmy Iovine, and you’re Apple, and truthfully, you’re great. You guys are going to do great things with Beats, but … you know, I don’t have to lose in order for you guys to win, and let’s just remember that.’ Again, I’m not angry. I actually told him, ‘Yo, you should be helping me. This is for the artist. These are people that you supported your whole life. You know, this is good.'”
While Tidal is just one more company for Apple to compete with in the music space, its artist-friendly approach mirrors Apple’s in many ways.
Following the success of Tidal shareholder Beyonce with her exclusive iTunes album in December 2013, Apple has been talking with the world’s top musicians, with the rationale that landing more exclusive deals for its music service is, in some ways, better than cheaper prices.
Iovine is well-connected in the music world, but if artists decide to avoid brokering deals with Apple in order to give Tidal a shot, it could cause a few headaches for Apple. Then again, ultimately artists are going to go where the money is — and, right now, that’s certainly with Cupertino.
Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
16 responses to “Jay Z challenges Apple with artist-owned streaming music service”
Poor famous, rich musicians. They really do need all the help they can get.
Jay Z a musician? To call him a musician is using that term VERY loosely. He never studied how to play a musical instrument and he doesn’t sing. Rapping isn’t really a musician, it’s just rhyming using vulgar lyrics for the most part. There’s not much musicianship required.
I can write lyrics that rhyme to.
Hickory Dickory dock, go suck my ******. etc. etc. See? That doesn’t require much musicianship now does it? they teach little children how to rhyme in elementary school. Big deal.
Agreed. Artists was another option although I think similar arguments could be applied. Finding a generic grouping noun that bests describes this lot is a little tricky without being a bit rude.
I felt like the whole thing was a bad joke as soon as I saw Kanye. Now I can’t take the rest of them seriously.
I don’t see any artists that sell $30 concert tickets and 500,000 copies as part of this…or is It just the biggies as owners for now?
Get ready for the Tidal wave of lawsuits between these A-List artists and their lawyers. This isn’t going to go well.
Why is that?
Its all about the service at this point. If Apple introduced a service like this and charged the same amount of money, Apple would knock it out of the park because of its name and not what it would have to offer. Lots of times I hear people say “No way would I spend 20 per month on a music service” and that same person will go and buy drinks for the crew all night and spend upwards of 150 or more. I think J’s service is for the true audiophile as you will need some type of digital converter to convert that raw information to a digital signal so in theory this is like the rich person’s Spotify or iTunes.
Not bad in pricing… $10.00 for CDQ and $20 for lossless? I don’t care too much about audio quality, but this should be interesting. If Beyonce drops an album on this 2 weeks before it’s available anywhere else, believe believe believe people they’ll see user signs up (to the tune of 500k) in a week. Same goes with Rihanna, Jay-z, Coldplay, etc. These are all people with followings… I’m excited to see where this goes. Maybe Apple will buy this too ?
$10 isn’t for CD quality, Lossless is closer to CD quality than Lossy. Lossy is <CD quality. I hope that you understand that Lossy (MP3, AAC) loses some of the information that was present in the recording before the encode to the Lossy format.
oh, really? maybe that was where I was confused… but thanks for the clarification.
It’s OK. discussing digital formats confuses probably about 99% of the human population.
There is a lot of confusion regarding formats, and what we actually get.
There are different ways recordings are tracked, converted, up sampled, down sampled, mastered that unless you are told specifically all of the things associated with each recording, we typically get crap from the consumer’s standpoint.
But as a general rule, Lossless is bit for bit identical to uncompressed, Lossy isn’t.
Out of all of the recordings I have, only a small handful I can honestly say were well recorded and what i got at my end is a really good recording.
I’ve got a few CDs or Lossless files that actually sound really, really good. But if you have ever been in a top recording studio what these engineers are listening to compared to what it sounds like on our end is totally different unless you have really expensive system in a really good room with excellent room acoustics or have really good headphones/DAC/headphone amp.
That’s why these audiophiles can and will spend gobs of money on high end equipment because they are in pursuit of the sound quality the mastering studios have.
A typical high end mastering studio has literally hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of monitors, amps, electronics, etc. in a close to perfect soundproofed, acoustically treated room. Bob Ludwig, one of the top mastering engineers that has done thousands of recordings, has speakers that cost $100K a pair, amps that are also about $100K, speaker cables that are in excess of $20K (yeah, you heard right, not a typo) and he’s got hundreds of thousands of dollars on all of his electronics in a close to perfect listening room. So, he’s got essentially the best conditions and that’s what he’s used to. Most of us don’t have that much money to spend on equipment and the room, and he’s also listening to the original masters, we aren’t.
If you want to hear these recordings well, you would probably have to spend about $3 to $5K on a pair of high end headphones/DAC/headphone amp and keep the volume down so you don’t destroy your hearing. :-)
I can’t imagine Apple buying something which has the unique selling point of Apple not owning it… Or am I missing something vital?
“Yo, you should be helping me” What a scum bag. Jimmy or Apple for that matter shouldn’t help Jay Z make money in a competing business. Jay Z comes off very desperate. I think Jay Z is now looking how much Tidal makes in revenues and how much they pay out in overhead and reality is going to start setting in.
Good idea to have an artist owned site and I really like the idea of the HQ version. I would certainly consider that as I don’t know of anyone else offering this. The artists create the content so it’s only right that they get the lions share of the money. I can see this giving iTunes a real headache if they can secure exclusive deals with enough big name artists.