News - 30/01/2015

Jay-Z enters the music streaming game by acquiring WiMP and Tidal

Jay-Z enters the music streaming game by acquiring WiMP and Tidal


In a move that even the most forward-thinking analyst would have found hard to predict, Project Panther Bidco Ltd, a company controlled by Jay-Z, has agreed to buy Aspiro, the company responsible for the music streaming service WiMP and the recently-launched high quality service Tidal.

WiMP is currently available in Germany, Denmark, Norway, Poland and Sweden. In September 2014, the company announced the launch of Tidal, a service targeting users that want to stream music at CD quality. Tidal so far has launched in the UK, US, Canada, the Netherlands, Finland, Ireland, Belgium and Luxembourg.

The move may be surprising, but Jay-Z has a good eye for business and Aspiro is a pretty solid buy. Before the company launched Tidal (which inevitably would have required a significant investment) it was profitable. The company went public pretty early on which on the one hand put a break on its international ambitions but on the other made it focus on making a profit. None of the other stand-alone music streaming companies - are as of yet - public.

Now: what will Jay-Z do with Aspiro? The Tidal service is great and well-designed, but at $20 per month it will always be a niche product. Can he steer the company towards launching a direct competitor to Spotify in the US? What’s certain is that 2015 is shaping up to be a fun year in the digital music world.

(Andrea Leonelli)

© 2024 All rights reserved. Rockol.com S.r.l. Website image policy

Rockol

  • Rockol only uses images and photos made available for promotional purposes (“for press use”) by record companies, artist managements and p.r. agencies.
  • Said images are used to exert a right to report and a finality of the criticism, in a degraded mode compliant to copyright laws, and exclusively inclosed in our own informative content.
  • Only non-exclusive images addressed to newspaper use and, in general, copyright-free are accepted.
  • Live photos are published when licensed by photographers whose copyright is quoted.
  • Rockol is available to pay the right holder a fair fee should a published image’s author be unknown at the time of publishing.

Feedback

Please immediately report the presence of images possibly not compliant with the above cases so as to quickly verify an improper use: where confirmed, we would immediately proceed to their removal.