Is Samsung going to buy Tidal after all?

Is Samsung going to buy Tidal after all?

Tidal, the music streaming service largely owned by rapper, producer and serial entrepreneur Jay-Z, might eventually end up a property of Samsung’s according to a report by the "New York Post" where the American daily also hints to potential partnership talks between Tidal and Google and Spotify.
Should the leakage prove accurate, the story would closely remind of what happened with Beats and Apple, although on slightly different terms.
On the one hand, Dr Dre’s and Jimmy Jovine’s company had already established a thriving headphones brand and business prior to topping it with a streaming platform which would have eventually been merged into the current Apple Music - while Tidal’s is a pure player model only.
On the other hand, just like Beats’ platform was having a hard time scaling on the eve of the giant sale (it recently announced reaching 11 million paying subscribers), that appears to be also Tidal’s current situation: before last week’s Kanye West’s “The life of Pablo” exclusivity move it was declaring a million subscribers.

Both Kanye West and Rihanna own equity in Tidal, and while it has been long clear that exclusives are quite an effective shortcut to increasing subscribers, it is especially evident that shareholders would be keen to give up immediate additional revenues to quickly increase the company’s value and pursue a potentially much more remunerative exit strategy. Jay-Z paved the way back in 2013, when his “Magna Charta Holy Grail” album was launched via a Samsung app that made it available three days ahead of its official release: Samsung bought a million copies of the album upfront as a payout for the temporary exclusive and recently repeated the move purchasing a million digital copies of Rihanna’s “Anti” album.