Remember Tidal?

This week, music streaming service Tidal announced it will start offering a free plan.

But wait, what's Tidal??

The short version - a music streaming company that started in Norway, got bought by Jay Z (the rapper) and then sold to Square (the payments company). It hasn't had the bestest of times over the last few years, having "missed" payments to artists and having to deny accusations they inflated their subscriber numbers.

On mobile, they're not very popular either.

On mobile, there's one popular music app, Spotify, and then a bunch of "others". Between January and October of 2021, Spotify saw 154 million new downloads, according to our estimates. That's more than the rest of the apps on our list combined!

But this isn't about Spotify but rather Tidal. After being sold in March, new owner Square has plans to (try) and get into the race. A free offering is the easiest way to do that. But... there's really no guarantee it'd make a dent. Spotify has a free plan, as do the rest of the contenders.

I think that alone won't be enough. Spotify already won that race. Tidal does have a differentiator, sound quality, which is why it's making some money. Let's see how that plays out and if Tidal can bring in free users and convert them into audiophiles so they upgrade.

There is one interesting twist here that aligns with the trend we see on social media. In addition to a free plan, Tidal also announced it will be changing how it pays artists in 2022. While most of the market aggregates streaming revenue and divides it, Tidal claims it will pay each artist based on how much time their music was consumed by users who subscribe to its highest price plan.

That's a substantial difference!

Spotify also announced a similar plan, but it hasn't actually implemented it, so maybe it's not as easy as Tidal thinks it could be.

Artists weren't always the most important thing in the music world, as strange and bizarre as that sounds, but as we've learned by looking at Twitch, TikTok, YouTube, and Twitter (but only somewhat), creators (aka. artists) are now the stars.