At the end of March, the music world was introduced to Swedish company Aspiro‘s and hip-hop megastar Jay-Z’s big idea to combat the major streaming services paying musicians next to nothing for playing their music to the masses. With public and financial support from musicians and bands like Daft Punk, Kanye West, Calvin Harris, Beyoncé, Rihanna, deadmau5, Arcade Fire, and many more, the hype behind what has come to be known as TIDAL continued to rise with each artist that was standing by Jay-Z at the announcement event. With promises of lossless audio and exclusive content, TIDAL grabbed the interests and curiosity of many music fans across the globe. However, with high expectations came great disappointment.
It hasn’t even been a month since the service dropped and since the announcement, TIDAL has dealt with a disastrous launch and has had its original CEO replaced in the midst of its troubles. On top of that, enticing music consumers with cool goodies and slapping a twenty dollar price tag to it may diminish any interest or curiosity in the application (especially when there are plenty of other music streaming services that do a little less for free).
But to find out if TIDAL is truly as big of a master disaster as people are saying, take look at its performance on the charts. Although in its first week the streaming service sky-rocketed into the iPhone App Store’s top twenty apps, it swiftly fell far below the top 700 in about two weeks. To add instant salt to the wounds, TIDAL’s major competitors Pandora and Spotify were able to simultaneously take the No. 3 and No. 4 spots on the U.S. iPhone revenue charts, respectively. And to top it all off, Apple’s own streaming service Beats Music has started to pass the U.S. iPhone top twenty revenue chart.
Unfortunately, TIDAL faces an unprecedented catastrophe caught in the eye of the public. It may have been expected that the app wouldn’t be a super success, but to watch its rivals usurp the top chart spots from it after making ambitious claims about how amazing their product is can be hard a little hard to watch. It’s the equivalent of watching an amateur juggler starting off fine and dropping everything he’s thrown into the air ten minutes later. If TIDAL doesn’t fix or change these problems soon, they will be smoked by the competition within the year or less.
Source: BRG.com