Square To Buy Jay-Z's Music Service Tidal

Square has agreed to buy a majority stake in Tidal, the streaming music service led by rapper Jay-Z, as part of an effort to expand the company's suite of financial tools to musicians and emerging artists. From a report: Square will pay $297 million in a mix of cash and stock to become Tidal's "significant majority" owner, though Jay-Z and Tidal's other existing artist-shareholders will retain some ownership in the company. Tidal will operate independently within Square, according to a company release, and Jay-Z will join Square's board of directors. "New ideas are found at intersections, and we believe there's a compelling one between music and the economy," Square Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey said in a prepared statement. Bloomberg News previously reported that Dorsey and Jay-Z, who are friends, had discussed a potential deal. It's not immediately clear how Square will help Tidal build its business, but there is a lot of overlap between the music industry and Square's existing market, which includes payments and commerce, says Jesse Dorogusker, the Square executive who will serve as interim leader of Tidal inside its new parent company.

Money laundering.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why else would someone pay a princely sum for a failing business completely unrelated to their main one?

Re:

[alvinrod]

It's a way for their buddies who own the failing business to cash out before the whole thing collapses and becomes completely worthless.

Square

[MBGMorden]

At first I was confused and was thinking "Square Enix". That would have been more exciting (from an interesting read standpoint - I can't bring myself to care what happens with this company).

Huh?

[Chagar]

I love this comment "but there is a lot of overlap between the music industry and Square's existing market". Huh? No there's not, just 2 wealthy buddies grabbing for more money. In what way does this make any sense?

Re:

[BrainJunkie]

Both companies deliver their services via packets, so there's that.

Re:

[ZipK]

Both companies have some number of paying customers. So there's that, too.

More monopolies in music

[xack]

And the ghosts of Napster still sail the seas.

Jay-Z stole from artist on his service

[Vintermann]

It got little coverage in the international press, but one or more whistleblowers leaked a hard disk with Tidal streaming play counts to the Norwegian newspaper Dagens Næringsliv.

It revealed that someone had added millions of fake plays of two particular albums in particular, Beyoncé's "Lemonade" and Kanye West's "Life of Pablo". They spread out across real users of the service. The newspaper amused themselves by visiting some well-known people in the dataset, and asking them if they really listened to "Life of Pablo" fifty times in one day. The listens were obviously faked, with plays starting at the same minute every hour, etc.

The way payout works in streaming services is that subscriber fees are pooled before being distributed out according to total plays, minus the service's cut. The user's subscription fee does not go to the artists you listen to, but to what's listened to across the service as a whole. Thus, services who have few active listeners pay out a lot more per play than services that are actually used.

This basically means that when Beyonce's and West's numbers were inflated, it wasn't just to look good in the charts. It directly took money from every other artist that got played those months on Tidal, even their celebrity friends which they suckered into promoting their service. Beyoncé is of course Jay-Z's wife, and also was at the time.

Re:

[ITRambo]

A DuckDuckGo search brought up this: https://www.foxnews.com/entert... [foxnews.com]

Re:

[Vintermann]

The original article is in Norwegian and much of it is paywalled. But you can find summaries in English easily enough, e.g. this [newsinenglish.no].

Curated content with paid access & tipping

[hashish16]

This will be huge for smaller artists if they can create a subscription based system for curated content from specific artists or even paid live performances as they already own the payment system. Boy does Tidal suck as it is.

As a shareholder, I am getting worried

[DeplorableCodeMonkey]

This is now the second big WTF decision by Jack in the last few months. The first was the decision to drop $170M into BTC.

Yes, they made a profit recently, but even Twitter has been profitable once or twice.

There's just no business justification for buying an also-ran business in this market at such a high price.

Re:

[olsmeister]

Hedge your long position with some options.

Re:As a shareholder, I am getting worried

[thegarbz]

for buying an also-ran business

Tidal isn't an also ran as much as it is a niche market. Kind of like how Alienware isn't an alsoran compared to the rest of Dell's PC sales. Ask the common man what they listen to and it'll be Spotify. Walk into any hifi shop and they won't even stock streaming units that aren't compatible with Tidal. Look at music services or devices and you'll get marketing lines such as "Roon manages the music from all of your digital sources: TIDAL, Qobuz, NAS, hard drives, iTunes, live radio. And much more." Naim has the decency to list support in their equipment alphabetically, but will offer a free trial to a Tidal subscription with any purchase of their compatible hardware. Cambridge also list support alphabetically but in the picture of someone enjoying music, it's the Tidal app on their phone. Go to any "audiophile" forum and Tidal gets shilled like you would not believe.

Tidal the as you put it "also-ran" business is somehow both an also-ran and also big enough that it caused both Amazon to release a HD music service and Spotify to release a HiFi equivalent of their service later this year. Something about your post doesn't add up.

Also not shilling for Tidal, couldn't care less, and definitely not paying for it myself much less getting paid for it. CDs were good enough for my dad and they're good enough for me.

Re:

[M.D.Smith]

I'm an audio guy. Not a self proclaimed "audiophile" but I own probably more in music equipment than computers and tech currently. Digital and analog DJ stuff, producing, and recording with instruments. I have several friends that are as well. Nothing major but enough so that I have an ear to the ground on these things as they are directly adjacent to several of my hobbies.

This was definitely not the case for my peer group. It never filled a gap for us that was large enough to be usefully put in its own bas

Re:

[thegarbz]

No self respecting card carrying member of the PC gaming master race would own an Alienware and brag about it.

The alienware example was a demonstration of a product which serves a niche, not some declaration of bragging. That's where Alienware and Tidal differ. You so no hifi company dares release a product that isn't also compatible with Tidal. But you said it yourself DJ stuff. You represent a niche in the music industry as well, just a different one and I have no doubt that Tidal is useless to you. (To be honest it's useless to everyone, but try and tell an audiophile that high bit rate AAC file will sound good

Re: As a shareholder, I am getting worried

[M.D.Smith]

On my phone but wanted to touch on a couple things cause the convo was good.

Saying it isnâ(TM)t something to brag about was more of me making a point. Not saying thatâ(TM)s how you intended it, but it immediately felt accurate, maybe just not the way you had hoped. LoL. The one self proclaimed audiophile I know would make a vegan blush with their bluster. But even they seemed to shoot down Tidal for their lossless local formats. One anecdote doesnâ(TM)t data make though and I get that.

The nic

NFT FTW

[PopeRatzo]

The story from this morning about Kings of Leon releasing their new album as a non-fungible token is potentially much more meaningful in the overall musical scheme of things. It could really transform the relationship between musicians, and their fans and could radically change the landscape for all these streaming services.

https://www.rollingstone.com/p... [rollingstone.com]

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/0... [cnbc.com]

Re:

[alvinrod]

They're interesting, but I'm not really sure how they change anything as far as streaming services go. Their utility only really extends to physical goods and services (the Rolling Stone article mentions preferred seating, free merchandise, and a VIP treatment at actual concerts as an example) because trying to gate digital goods behind a digital token is as pointless as any other attempt because anyone can always pirate those. Sure you could use it as a key to enable a person to download some digital conte

Re:

[PeeAitchPee]

I wouldn't say that the implementation of NFTs is inherently "much more meaningful in the overall musical scheme of things." If the only thing that makes my copy of a song different from another guy's is a unique hash, who really cares? Rather, the contrived scarcity of NFTs enables artists to tie digital objects to real-world experiences and things, making it easier to monetize using stuff they're already selling (digital music) to increase their margins. Special high-end fan experiences and the like ha

Tidal sucks

[PeeAitchPee]

Not that I've ever used it, and I never will . . . but it is constantly popping up in Plex despite the Lifetime Pass I paid for years ago. I'm sure there's some way to semi-permanently disable it, but like all good zombies, after a few updates (typically a "cool new interface!" put out by the Plex kids) it comes right back. In my experience, something that you have to incessantly harass your users to use is almost always a piece of shit and not worth even trying out.

Smartaudio move

[ElitistWhiner]

UX sucks but its content doesn’t. Square can fix one and add streams to smart devices it bypasses gatekeepers of MP3 era content.

It could be the millennial platform