Jay Z Reveals Plans for Tidal, a Streaming Music Service | Hacker News Reader

Jay Z Reveals Plans for Tidal, a Streaming Music Service

nytimes.com

28 pointsValG57 comments

I'd pay $20/month or more for a service that:

* had high quality streams

* had gigantic library

* _biggest of all_ cracked the 'discovery' nut.

I listen to music all day, I don't like to listen to the same tracks more than a few times so I have a hard time keeping my queue full.

I'm a Spotify subscriber so I'll find an artist I think is interesting, play their whole discography and then start digging into 'related artists' to find new stuff.

This is a bit of a drag and is hit or miss. I don't necessarily want to find related music, but music that I might like. Spotify's radio feature is just about useless. Voting one way or the other will skew it to play pretty much _only_ the thumbs up'ed artist or avoid a genre entirely if you thumbs down a particular track.

I still think there is a killer music service waiting to be born. I don't think Tidal will be it.

I like Spotify's discovery. I subscribe to a lot of playlists that are constantly updated where I can get a lot of new artists from. Never used the radio, I just go to their playlists and find Americana or Alternative or whatever I'm looking for.

I've tried many of their playlists. I've found some that are very good and was thrilled to find them, however the content was easy to exhaust and I ended up picking apart those playlists for new artists. Back to square 1 if you will.

I know it sounds like whining, but I really think the 'killer app' of music will be something that can effortlessly pick out the unknown gems from the ocean of new music. I'm continually surprised about the quality of new music but I don't like to have to dig around for it my self.

I can't help but feel that you're doing it wrong?

Spotify playlists are beautiful because you subscribe to it. The playlists are updated and curated continuously. This is true of the Spotify-published playlists and those of musicians, celebrities, etc.

Maybe I'm just subscribed to the wrong ones, but the Spotify playlists I'm subscribed to don't update that often, and they aren't that long. If I listen for hours a day, there's no way the Spotify playlists will keep up with providing new music. Pandora is better in that respect but worse in almost all others, unfortunately.

Sure, i know what you're saying. The playlists I do subscribe to are indeed updated continuously. However updates are relatively minor. A few songs from artists already on the list, maybe one or two totally new-to-me artists every other week. I'm not saying it's nothing but I want more.

Spotify boasts a gigantic library, I cant imagine I've heard everything good (objectively) already. There has to be thousands of hours of material that I simply can't find that I'd otherwise love to hear.

The key for me was to find interesting people to follow on Spotify. There are a lot of folks who seem to do music discovery as a full-time gig. Find/follow enough of those people and your hunger will be satiated.

Though, I wish there were better ways to discover people to follow, it's fairly manual now and much of it goes on outside of Spotify.

Tidal is close. They offer Flac lossless streaming.

What do you think of Pandora's radio stations?

It has been a couple years since I've given Pandora a fair try. I was a paid subscriber for a while but I ended up leaving the service because I thought their radio stations and library were too shallow. I'd request a station for an artist only to find it was not available or when available they'd only play a narrow spectrum of related songs.

Also their radio stations suffered the same problem as Spotify does. Trying to tune the station by giving feedback on dis/likes only caused the station to focus in.

I could give them a try again if they've expanded their selections.

Here's the problem: I don't want another music service. I want all my favorite artists on one music service. There is literally no reason for them to not be other than various forms of greed.

Garth Brooks created his own music streaming service because the people behind the album don't get enough attention. Taylor Swift doesn't put her music on Spotify because she can make more money on iTunes. Jay Z creates a streaming service to put out higher quality music files at a higher price. The result? I don't listen to their music even though I really want to (I know Jay Z is still on Spotify).

Hey Taylor, this isn't 2005, where I would buy a bunch of MP3s from anywhere and put them on my iPod. I don't store music locally, hardly anyone does. Apple doesn't even make a large-disk iPod anymore. Likewise, how many people are going to be willing to subscribe to multiple music sources like they do Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon?

You have a problem with Spotify? Work with them. Let's ask Sony how they fared coming up with Crackle instead of using Netflix.

Maybe the time has come for someone to write a "pidgin for music streaming services", a wrapper client with playlists and search that jumps between all your subscribed services depending on track availability :P

Competition = good, one music service to rule them all = bad. Good on Tailor Swift for keeping Spotify on their toes. Good on you for choosing Spotify and not Tidal.

Let a thousand musical flowers bloom, and may they forever compete for attention of the bees, giving us more colors and extravagance as time progresses.

Please keep making alternative music services and please keep giving us more choice, better quality and lower prices.

Remember how the Hundred Flowers Campaign ended -- with an extinction event. Something not dissimilar is going to happen to these streaming services, because they simply do not differentiate from each other sufficiently.

Oh my, I had no idea about the grim background of that soundbite... You're right, that totally changes what I thought was a beautiful figure of speech.

That's ok; it is a lovely figure of speech.

More choice doesn't mean better quality. It means you are far more likely to make the wrong choice, and that you have to invest more energy into doing so.

And that can really eliminate the convenience such a service aims to provide in the first place.

Choice is good when the options are differentiated. Like choosing between a CD, an MP3, or a streaming service. It's not nearly so good when you are choosing between Stream A, Stream B, or Stream C.

The same argument could be made for cars or airlines or hamburgers. Too much choice, I might chose wrong oh noes you could get locked into the wrong $10 service for a month.

Yes, it could. And I suppose you're going to argue that user experience means nothing? That, as a company, getting "locked into the wrong $10 service for a month" is a perfectly ideal way to treat your customers?

Who said anything about one music service to rule them all?

Spotify, iTunes, etc. could all exist and carry all the music, and compete on their software, reliability, etc.

Crackle is still up and running. They have original programming in addition to movie back titles.

Meanwhile Netflix's catalog has gotten weaker outside of their original content, as more content owners have setup their own streaming services.

> There is literally no reason for them to not be other than various forms of greed.

Isn't the reason more to do with the copyright system than with greed? Unless you're talking about the influence that greedy people have over politics and thus copyright legislation.

I'd like to see a creative commons streaming service that automatically paid artists using Bitcoin. With no intermediary.

But I'm kind of a weird customer. I've boycotted copyrighted works for long durations.

That said, I am not a spotify subscriber. But I'm enough of a fan of these artists that I will likely subscribe.

You single out Taylor Swift, the number one recording artist in the country today. She's sold millions and millions of albums. Her brand in this country is certainly bigger than Spotify's.

If spotify had 100 million active users you bet your ass Taylor Swift and every other professional recording artist would be in their catalog. But it's just a fraction of that size. Streaming music is still a fragmented market. Spotify is not the platform your comment suggests.

I didn't single out Swift. I mentioned her in conjunction with Jay Z and Garth Brooks.There are a lot of bigger artists on Spotify than Taylor Swift though.

Jay Z and Garth Brooks are also among the best selling recording artists of all time. All three have bigger brands than Spotify. And Swift is currently the best selling artist in the United States, so "bigger artists" is clearly subjective...

> You have a problem with Spotify? Work with them.

I think that's a lot of what this is about: getting some leverage for deals with Spotify et al.

why Spotify? If you want one streaming service that has all the artists you complain about not working with Spotify, well, Google Play All Access already exists. And I suspect the same is true of iTunes Radio.

I don't think Taylor Swift has any more greed than Spotify. It's just less couth because the profit motive is not in a human's charter.

The plan was unveiled on Monday at a brief but highly choreographed news conference in Manhattan, where Jay Z stood alongside more than a dozen musicians identified as Tidal’s owners. They included Rihanna, Kanye West, Madonna, Nicki Minaj, Jack White, Alicia Keys, the country singer Jason Aldean, the French dance duo Daft Punk (in signature robot costumes), members of Arcade Fire, and Beyoncé, Jay Z’s wife.

That's a lot of cooks!

I think what's interesting is that this in intended to give artists buy-in to the streaming service. If they can get enough exclusive material and artists, I could see it take off. A few months ago I remember reading a post by an artist that said this is the only way for artists to get their fair share, but no one was big enough to tackle it, maybe Jay Z is the guy to do it?

you spelled "kook" wrong, independant of the quality of the broth.

“This is a platform that’s owned by artists,” - Jay Z

I think he meant, "This is a platform owned by established, rich, and ageing artists, whose resolve to assist up-and-comers should rightfully be questioned."

Not to say this can be any worse then something like Spotify, which already trounces over the independents, but I hardly think this is a likely group to bring democracy and creativity back to the musical scene.

> I think he meant, "This is a platform owned by established, rich, and ageing artists, whose resolve to assist up-and-comers should rightfully be questioned."

An actual artist-owned platform (a co-operative model where artists = shareholders) would actually be pretty awesome.

> But one executive involved in the negotiations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the deals were private, said that participating artists were being granted shares in exchange for their good-faith efforts to supply exclusive content

I think the problem with an artist-owned platform is that I actually want the platform to be agnostic in terms of what is actually surfaced. When I open Rdio, I can see what's popular amongst everyone, my network, or just me. I don't want that to be affected by the owners also being the product.

What really concerns me is the double-talk.

> “I just want to be an alternative,” Jay Z said. “They don’t have to lose for me to win.”

But the strategy is clearly going to be largely based on exclusive content. This doesn't mean Rdio and spotify lose, it means the fans lose because they have to spend the time and energy they would normally put into enjoying music towards weighing the different streaming options.

I guess Jay said it best: "I'm not a businessman, I'm a business, man." That's the artist that owns this "artist-owned" platform.

When artists make it big, don't they usually start their own labels anyways? We also have rich artists very active in the music industry, providing capital and such...I mean, it is the industry they known and succeeded in!

This is sort of like a programmer who made it big in an IPO becoming a venture capitalist for software tech companies: I'm sure that has happened before.

Yup.

I can't speak for the others, but both Jay Z & Kanye are very heavy into promoting new artists.

Jay essentially created two of the men standing up there (J Cole & Kanye), and Kanye has been instrumental in pushing Big Sean, Kid Cudi, Pusha T, and Chief Keef among others into the limelight.

They, along with birdman & lil wayne are the biggest promoters of new artists in the rap game.

Actually, you can only publish if you're registered with one of four record labels: https://tidalsupport.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201167132...

That says unsigned artists must register with one of those four services. From their web page, the first one listed (https://www.recordunion.com/) is a digital distribution company that charges under $15/year to interface with an online store on the artist's behalf.

If an artist is signed to a label then it's on the label to have a working relationship with the online stores and streaming services.

So... they have to pay $15 a year for someone else to upload their music?

This is normal. I think Pandora and Grooveshark are the only services that don't require a distributor for unsigned artists.

None of those companies are labels, they are all distributors - I suspect in short order you will see more of the major distributors on board, e.g. The Orchard, InGrooves, and possibly some of the commodity style ones too like TuneCore and CD Baby

Up-and-coming artists seem to be quite happy with Bandcamp these days.

“The challenge is to get everyone to respect music again, to recognize its value,” said Jay Z, whose real name is Shawn Carter. “Water is free. Music is $6 but no one wants to pay for music. You should drink free water from the tap — it’s a beautiful thing. And if you want to hear the most beautiful song, then support the artist.”

---

Water is metered here in Slovenia, more like on-demand streaming.

This metaphor is all over the place. Water sure as shit isnt free, taxpayer support yes, free no. Should we not support all the people behind getting the water to your end of the pipe?

They might have a chance if these big name artists, and their record companies, agree to pull their music from all the other services.

Why not just let people download the songs? I would hate to stream FLACs... Or stream anything for that matter.

Then again, Bandcamp already does it.

Yeah, I'd rather download stuff too, but we're not the average user. I think an ideal platform does both.

I don't know if the world is ready for this kind of thing. As an audiophile I think it is great that we're going to get access to a trove of lossless music, but I think the majority who is happy listening to music through their iPhone earphones and tinny speakers in their smartphones won't care (especially not enough to pay double the cost of a Spotify subscription).

Then there is the kind of internet speed required to stream lossless music. For those who have FLAC's in their music collection know that an album is hundreds of megabytes compared to a V0 rip which is only usually around the 75 to 100mb mark (depending on length and tracks). Now imagine streaming a track that is upwards of 20mb+? Here in Australia we have poor internet, we're ranked pretty low. I already struggle to stream 320kbps from Spotify Premium on my connection. The story is the same in New Zealand and other parts of the world. Then you have the bandwidth limitation, a lossless streaming platform would chew through potentially gigabytes of data (in Australia we still have bandwidth caps and we get speed limited or charged extra for going over them).

Then there is the subject of modern music production. Sad to say it, but most modern music is so overproduced and compressed during the mixing stage that it doesn't matter if you're listening to a 128kbps MP3 or lossless, it won't sound any better. Most music is destroyed in the studio before it is even released, therefore not worthy of listening to in any high bitrate format. If you want to debate this, I implore you to read up on "the loudness wars" in which it has been pretty documented that music is getting louder and the louder it gets, the lower the quality is (as the dynamics and peaks are stripped out).

I think Tidal is great, but I am very sceptical that it will address the issues people currently have with Spotify, more specifically how it pays out royalties. I do think there is a serious lack of strong music platforms that encourage discovery. As great as Spotify is, it doesn't let me fluidly discover new music. Rather I find myself clicking through related artists which feels counter-intuitive considering how much music and music data there is out there. Tidal very much comes across to me as a platform built by a rich music industry hotshot, backed by equally big and established artists who have sold millions.

I would love to see the idea of a VIP backstage feature incorporated into a platform like this. You can pay a monthly subscription fee to subscribe to an artist and in return get access to a members only area with exclusive early release music, discount merchandise, pre-release concert tickets, a chat feature/Q&A and other member only private features. I think something like that could work really well for large groups like One Direction and artists like Justin Bieber especially. Seems like a logic additional revenue stream for large and small artists alike.

It is a really nice idea, coupled with the exclusives component as well, but I just don't think the majority cares enough about music quality as a select few do. Most people cannot probably even hear the difference between lossless and a 320 MP3 (especially considering they're listening on prosumer equipment like iPhones and MacBooks). I would definitely use this if it had some classic artists on here, 60's/70's rock and blues that wasn't overproduced and would sound great lossless (like Led Zeppelin's earlier material or The Beatles especially).

Metallica's Death Magnetic album - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Magnetic#Criticism_regard... is definitely not going to sound any better if it finds its way onto the Tidal platform, that is for sure.

Even if FLAC was required for "high-fidelity" -- it's not -- a 20mb track and assuming the track is at a super short length of 60 seconds is going at ~341kbps. YouTube is already pumping bits faster than that at 360p [0], so that really doesn't seem like a hard part of the equation, and surely the market for this is not looking to capture an audience smaller than YouTube's.

[0] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171

I was just using FLAC as a comparison for lossless considering when someone thinks of lossless audio they will mostly think of FLAC. Of course it goes deeper than that.

I think the hard part of the equation is still definitely dealing with bandwidth and speed limitations though. I have issues streaming Youtube video even more so than I do HQ Spotify tracks (and it is a problem more common in Australia particularly than most think). Optimisations can only go so far before you encounter hard limitations software cannot work around without a reduction in quality.

Considering the platform will offer 320 and lossless, I guess they're not limiting themselves to some small niche of the market. Most people will happily pay the same price for Spotify like quality and a possibly larger catalogue on Tidal, but I don't think the lossless aspect is going to be as big as Jay Z thinks. It's a marketing gimick more than it is a selling point for the general audio consumer.

1k/2k/4k video streaming seem to be coming along alright in many markets so I don't think lossless audio streaming is over the top. Totally understand the sucky situation in Australia though. Maybe an aussie cdn cache could help in that particular market?

It might work in the same way that selling overpriced (but, from what I hear, still decent) Beats headphones has worked out. It wouldn't surprise me if a significant number of people will prefer Tidal because it has 'lossless music' and sounds 'totally better'.

Whether it actually matters most of the time is not that important, in the same way that discussions about Beats headphone's price/quality are not so interesting to most people who buy these things.

Not to sound like a naysayer but this is going to tank so hard it's not even funny.

I'll avoid the obligatory XKCD (927), but doesn't this move, and all other fractionalizing of the music industry, merely serve to make Piracy the most appealing option?

not that I mind; I haven't paid for music since 2007.

HE. Jay Hova!

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