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Tidal passes three million users, one year after Jay-Z acquisition

By | Published on Wednesday 30 March 2016

Tidal

Tidal has grown its subscriber base so to pass the three million point a year after Jay-Z bought the streaming service. Five months ago it was reporting one million users, and at the point it was acquired it had 530,000 users.

It may still be lagging someway behind its key rivals, but Tidal would no doubt point out that picking up two million new users in five months isn’t too bad (assuming they’re not all still on a free trial post the release of the new Kanye West album, and could still cancel). And it is pretty impressive growth, especially when it previously took seven months to attract less than 500,000 new subscribers.

Although Team Tidal had some other stuff they wanted to say in a press release looking back at the company’s first year under Jay-Z’s rule. And “exclusives are the way forward” seemed to be the main point.

The company says that its biggest exclusive to date, Kanye West’s ‘The Life Of Pablo’ album, was streamed 250 million times in its first ten days on the service. The company claims that this is “ultimately changing the way the music industry views album rollouts”. Although that view may be one of fear at the reported 500,000 times ‘The Life Of Pablo’ was pirated on its first day.

It also points out that Rihanna’s latest album was downloaded 1.4 million times in its first 24 hours online, but given that it was a free download at that point, I’m not sure that proves anything.

It’s not just audio, mind. Exclusive video content is also making Tidal an attractive proposition, the firm claims. Citing Kanye West again, it said that 23 million people tuned in to watch the rapper’s recent Yeezy Season 3 fashion show. Although that does also demonstrate that at least 20 million of them weren’t then convinced to sign up to the streaming service.

The Tidal release also mentions its two scripted shows, and various music videos that have premiered on its platform, though stays tight lipped on viewing figures for those. It then claims it is also discovering the stars of tomorrow by promoting unsigned acts on the service, before adding that it raised $1.5 million for charity with its Tidal X1020 benefit show last year.

Though the one thing the press release didn’t mention, which it was talking about a lot around this time last year, is the tangible financial benefits for artists, ie that it would pay out more to creators than its competitors. It’s quite possible that the only people to really gain much in that regard from Tidal are the big name acts who turned up for that embarrassing launch event and were reportedly paid handsomely to do so.

Still, with streaming now the biggest revenue source for the US record industry, three million paying subscribers (45% of whom are reportedly on Tidal’s more expensive high-def audio tier) is something the music community wants right now. And with music streaming itself still a loss-making business, everyone needs to bank on Tidal and the like reaching a scale where they can change that.



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