Square acquires majority of Tidal in $297M deal
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It's a side ecosystem just like restaurants (Square has had a stake in Doordash after selling Caviar to them). Today, Square for Restaurants also released in Canada.
As a SQ investor I'm not crazy about this play but I see the long term reasoning. I also think JAY-Z might help with Cash App although its booming on its own and very much has the rapper demographic already (there are no shortage of songs and albums named Cash App for a reason).
Even eventbrite didn’t need square readers, people mostly buy their tickets in advance. Maybe it’s for event organizers to upsell at the event to attendees?
Maybe this is a play to demonstrate investment in black community, as someone else mentioned?
I'm curious about that, because everyone I know that has had to pay the Ticketmaster tax hates them. Many artists are vocal about their hate as well.
I assume there's a reason venues continue to use them exclusively, which makes me think Ticketmaster's grasp on the industry is fragile enough that it'll break once there's enough momentum behind an alternative.
Live Nation, the parent company of Ticketmaster, had operating income of $325M on $11.5B in revenue in 2019[1]. That’s less than 3% margin.
Most of the “Ticketmaster Tax” is going to the artist or venue, who get to offload any displeasure onto a convenient third party for a small fee.
[1] https://www.livenationentertainment.com/2020/02/live-nation-...
They are positioned to own not only how people transact in person, but who will be doing those transactions, where, and when.
Imagine they roll out a data product to their merchants that shows an Uber Hot-Spots style dataset of sales, demand, and trends in both merchandise and the wild psychographics you can learn from a music service.
Product placement in movies, tv shows, songs, books, news,....exhausting to keep track.
Like when YG Nipsey dropped "FDT "it wasn't a campaign ad, and Smith and Wesson wasn't funding "Nickname" by Qadir. Way different from Coke paying to have a bottle on the table during Modern Family or whatever.
But having a "stake" in eventbrite, may not really be enough to justify paying this price for an also ran in the music streaming business. What makes Tidal worth anywhere near $300m?
> [Jay-Z] will now help lead our entire company, including Seller and the Cash App, as soon as the deal closes.
Does this read as Jay-Z having an... operational role? I know Jack's leadership of Square and Twitter is fairly non-traditional but this was surprising to read.
It's a big world, so if you find the right platform for your best talent, you could become the next "surprise" too.
EDIT: After seeing the other comment I realize I might have misinterpreted who the parent comment is referring to, is it Jack or Jay-z?
I think the dissonance is that "leading an app" implies (to me) a more internally facing set of responsibilities than the kind of brand-building and collaboration I associate Jay with. Then again, maybe this is the strategic perspective that Jack believes these apps need.
Candidly, I'm also just chuckling at how some set of folks at Square are probably wondering to themselves "...is Jay-Z going to be my manager?"
Square Cash is really big in the black community so Jay-Z obviously have a lot to offer there to further expand the business.
With regards to Seller I think the idea is to push more for the "black owned business" motto and thus he will have a lot to offer there too.
Disclaimer, I used to work at Square
> Square has run similar campaigns [referencing a seperate Burger King campaign] with rappers like Travis Scott and Lil B and other influencers, triggering a network effect for the Cash App. With 120,000 replies, Travis Scott’s tweet gained more momentum than Burger King’s. If only 129 of the 120,000 who commented on his tweet were new to Cash App, then Square’s cost of customer acquisition would have been less than the $925 per user that banks pay on average, according to our research, and 6,000 comments, only 5% of the total, would have dropped it to $20. Moreover, as the converted users appear to spread the word on social media, the Cash App can acquire additional users from just one.
https://fintechradar.substack.com/p/breakdown-2-a-deep-dive-...
Jay Z is a bit unique among mainstream rappers, his first album , Reasonable Doubt, was released independently. He's much more involved on the business side then your typical act taken for a ride by the label and left broke.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-04/square-to...
https://newsroom.spotify.com/2021-02-22/five-things-to-know-...
EDIT: looks like Amazon HD might force re-sampling of 44.1KHz to 48KHz on Android, which is a shame if true.
my main use case for streaming is android auto, so I lowered my criteria to "no lossy-lossy reencode for bluetooth and works well with google assistant". so yt music was basically the only option for me. I would have tried amazon HD, but apparently google has deliberately made it hard to use with assistant, which hamstrings it for music in the car.
(not affiliated with spotify and not very pleased with the service in general myself, just saying.)
Edit: watermarking not fingerprinting
I'm currently on a Tidal free trial but I won't be moving from Spotify when it's up. I personally can't tell the difference. Maybe I'm half deaf but ignorence is bliss.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rAITjrK39fiJYOT53ghq9DbC-e4...
If it's helpful for you, the code 'LIDLMUSIC' gives a free 6-month Tidal trial. It might be UK specific I have no idea.
https://open.spotify.com/track/2in7T2TWPkJW6Z6Ih9P4Ew?si=7e6...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTcl20dgHSM
Sounds identical (and very noisy) on Spotify and Youtube on my very crappy laptop speakers. I don't own the CD.
https://www.mattmontag.com/music/universals-audible-watermar...
I’ve got a good set of speakers, and coupled with Tidal’s Master[1] quality recordings, there’s just no way I can go back to something of lower sound fidelity.
[1] https://support.tidal.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000397069-TID...
Would be curious to see if you can pass this test: http://abx.digitalfeed.net
Because what people fail to understand is that from source -> listener there are multiple points at which information is lost. People obsess over the file format but not over which DAC they use or whether Apple, Spotify, Tidal has better encoding capabilities.
But copyright can also cover the performance itself, not just the underlying music. So even though Beethoven's 9th symphony has long been public domain, for example, the Telarc recording of it by Christoph von Dohnanyi and the Celeveland Orchestra & Chorus is not. If you want to do something with that specific recording, you need permission.
Also, a particular arrangement might be copyrighted. Consider Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition". That was composed as a piano piece in 1874, and long ago became public domain.
Since then, numerous other composers have arranged it for orchestra, with the most well known arrangement probably being Maurice Ravel's in 1922. There have been dozens of other orchestrations including several this century, and also numerous arrangements for other types of groups and combinations of instruments and solo instruments.
A given recording will only be public domain if the underlying work, the arrangement, and the performance are all public domain.
I find it's only good at playing random songs on giant playlists, or playing the radio. Managing a library of albums is a huge pain and I still don't understand how it's supposed to work.
Then there is the problem of questionable digital masters. There's 0 transparency into the mastering process and what Spotify uses. As you've observed, some things just sound really awful on Spotify.
If you really want the best, I suggest Roon + Tidal subscription for playback. Then use Qobuz/Bandcamp/etc. to purchase lossless FLACs to import into Roon, or rip CDs yourself. This will give you the best quality, and you can be certain the source quality is good. You can use Tidal lossless for streaming things you don't buy (but the selection is much more limited). The Roon UX is way, way better than Spotify for managing a large collection of albums.
I think the big thing both Roon and Audirvana achieve sub-optimally is just overall application performance and user experience. They do have a ton of features which help in managing massive audio libraries, far better than Spotify or Tidal alone. But, Roon legitimately feels like a browser app they threw in an iframe and nativefied. Audirvana is better IMO, but isn't as good as Roon at auto-discovering album artwork and metadata-ifying the connections between your local songs for hyperlinking and discovery.
The critical thing that I love about that methodology of music playback is the "synthesis" they both do of Tidal and your local music. There is a ton of music out there that's inaccessible on (all!) streaming services, and every audiophile I know eventually starts amassing a collection of lossless files from Bandcamp/etc. Neither a streaming service nor your local library alone is ever the "complete" view into all the music you want to enjoy; you need both, synthesized into one integrated view. Google Play Music used to be a decent solution to this, not the greatest quality but it solved this problem well, but then Google nerfed it into the ground.
There's still a lot of work to be done in this domain. To be honest, my go-to for local music playback is the same app I've been using for a decade after the fall of Winamp; Foobar (Windows). Its simple, ridiculously performant, infinitely customizable, and works great.
I'm sorely tempted to build my own library/playlist management front-end on top of Spotify's API. They're the only streaming service I've found with an official streaming/remote control API, and with upcoming lossless support (albeit only CD-quality), their library with a tailor-made UI seems like the best trade-off I'm going to get in a music service.
I have a Focal Clear, Schiit Lyr 3, Schiit Bifrost 2 and I can not tell the difference between Tidal and Apple Music. There are tests online which people regularly post on Head-Fi and Reddit which also shows that almost all people can't distinguish lossless from high quality lossy encodes.
> or rip CDs yourself. This will give you the best quality
No it won't.
As Apple describes in their guide for Apple Music they have, "dynamic range that’s superior to red book CD audio" because they transcode from the high-bit masters.
None of this is an issue if you rip your own CDs or buy lossless from reputable sources in my experience. Spotify you're at the mercy of whatever crap Spotify has been given.
I have two music libraries: tidal and my own music (I'm using about 80% my own music). The music is well tagged already using picard, so I don't know how well that works out of the box. When I'm in the tidal library, I usually will mark an album/artist to be added to my normal music library and then it will start showing up there mixed in with my self hosted stuff.
The killer features (to me) are 1: playing by album instead of by track. I use the "random album" shuffle all the time and usually want to listen to an album all at once and 2: smart playlist builder which lets me make dynamic playlists around how many times I've played a thing, my personal rating, or when the last time I played it was.
Tidal pays musicians something like 3x what spotify does. [0] This is probably still not enough, but at least it's the right direction.
The higher sound quality has just been a bonus.
[0] https://soundcharts.com/blog/music-streaming-rates-payouts
The killer feature is curated metadata, dedicated to classical music: searching and browsing is infinitely superior. You can select a specific work and browse all its recordings. You can select a performer and view all their recordings. You can select a composer and filter their works by type, etc.
Could also be a play to help reframe how people think of Square and be able to expand in other categories SMBs might need.
Some? Can you please tell me about where you legally/legitimately can perform recorded music in a public place for public consumption without "permission"?
I think a merchandise vendor who could provide exclusive releases to attendees in addition to handling payment processing might be very attractive to artists.
A lot of dots can connect here.
It's conglomeracy and the theory of the firm. Mergers are efficient.
I think the next frontier in fintech is getting in every payment rail imaginable. The music part isn't relevant, it's the payment of artists that Square is most likely interested in. Square wants to process your deposit right into your CashApp bank account and pay for your records with the CashApp card.
Here's an article written 1 year ago about the Cashapp's traction with the hip hop community: https://trapital.co/2020/03/18/how-hip-hop-helped-cash-app-g...
An excerpt:
Here’s Square CEO Jack Dorsey at a 2019 investor conference via Wall Street Journal:
“This is also something we weren’t expecting, but I think Cash App has touched in the culture. We’ve just benefited from people loving it and wanting to sing about it, and putting it in their music videos, and it’s amazing how much that spreads.”
You can think what you want about this deal, but Dorsey is similar. It reminds me of Amazon in a lot of ways. They will absolutely try anything, no matter how weird. Some start-up delivers tacos by drones? The next week Amazon has a whole new AWS managed service to deliver tacos by drones, and shuts it down the next year.
If there is any business out there right now that has some potential to be the Amazon of consumer finance, it is Cash App. Obviously the chances any business could do that are low. It’s by no means a clear path to success, but you at least have to admire Square for trying weird shit and being willing to do anything to see what works.
First doubling down on Bitcoin, now a music streaming service. What next?
https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/7662726/tidal-sp...
Not sure why NYTimes said this was undisclosed. This would give revenues of approximately $240M a year generously assuming everyone is on the HiFi plan.
I haven’t been able to find more recent subscription numbers. Was Sprint able to push Tidal to their customer base?
It might also be a brave-like service where you can either buy Dorsey dollaroos (what I assume the logical name for a new crypto by square would be) or click on ads, then use the dollaroos to buy streams.
Absolutely not
As an avid TIDAL user I wish them well in their new "home".
How does the board approve of something like that even?
Also I chuckle at the people who think Twitter and Tesla CEOs are "similar". They are not. Musk will still be here in 10 years rolling and controlling. I'm not so sure about Jack.
Aren’t both Square and Twitter losing money?
(It probably helps that Dorsey is a founder of both companies).
no idea how it held on this long, even in the beginning seemed like ridiculous thing to start up and chance of artists flocking to it or it become dominant against apple and spotify etc was next to zero
Not to mention this is hardly Jay-Z's first exit. He sold his clothing brand Rocawear sometime in the 2000s and as the article says, he sold a luxury booze brand as well.
When it launched it was marked "DOA" and everyone said we didn't need another streaming service (even if Spotify was yet to really take off, but did eventually)
A few ppl use it for FLAC quality streams and under some impression the service pays artists more because the launch board was all top gross artists on a stage. But within a few years all these reports came out about falsified stream numbers / inaccurate etc for Beyonce and Kayne releases.
bah