TIDAL Hi-Fi streaming service announces US and UK launch in the fall
A very interesting piece of news coming from Norway this week as the streaming service WiMp announced that it will bring a high fidelity music service to the UK and the US this fall.
The new service, named TIDAL, is essentially a re-packaging of the high-quality music service WiMp launched alongside its normal subscription in October 2013.
WiMp is currently only available in Germany, Denmark, Norway, Poland and Sweden. The service shunned the rapid international expansion of other streaming platforms because, unusually, it is owned by a public company (Aspiro Group, listed on the Nasdaq OMX in Stockholm) and therefore is not willing to take the substantial losses that international expansion requires, usually funded by hundreds of millions of dollars in Venture Capital.
TIDAL claims to have a catalogue of over 25 million tracks in lossless quality (CD Quality at 44.1kHz/16 bit). This this isn’t the high definition sound that Neil Young wants for the Pono, but it’s much better than listening to a compressed stream. TIDAL will also offer access to over 75,000 HD videos as part of the service.
It’s not all about quality and videos though, as the company notes that it will place a lot of effort on curation with album spotlights, playlists, features on labels and artists, weekly playlists and even interviews.
The service will cost $19.99 in the US and an even steeper £19.99 in the UK, but the success of Neil Young’s Pono project shows that there is a real appetite for high definition audio and if the company can be profitable from the very beginning thanks to its higher price point that could lead to the growth of a niche but highly valuable user base.
WiMp’s choice to come to the UK and US with a cool, upmarket, high fidelity service such as TIDAL is an absolutely stunning move and it’s going to be very interesting to see how it plans on launching the service and reaching its target audience.
Partnerships with high-end headphone and speaker manufacturers could be an effective way to reach out to consumers who already care about what’s going in their ears.
No set date for the launch at the moment but interested early adopters can sign up on the service's home page to receive information about the launch.
(Andrea Leonelli)