Tidal’s user base grows to 3 million subscribers

It has been a year since Jay-Z took to the stage to announce the launch of Tidal. The press event was a disaster, featuring awkward superstars without anything particularly meaningful to say. The service was close to being dismissed as a doomed and misguided investment.

However, thanks to relentless plugs by Jay-Z and his friends, and particularly thanks to high-profile exclusives such as Rihanna’s “Anti” and Kanye West’s “The Life of Pablo”, Tidal has managed to add close to a million subscribers in 9 months, bringing the total to 3 million subscribers (which does not include users on a free trial).

Another positive statistic is that over a third of subscribers, or 1.25 million, have chosen the premium $19.99 per month subscription, allowing them to stream music lossless. This is an interesting number, since in terms of revenues is gives Tidal the same footprint of a service with 4.25 million subscribers. 

However, streaming services are expensive machines and, after Samsung denied rumours that it was considering a Tidal acquisition, the question is whether Jay-Z will be able to offload the service to someone else or whether he’ll decide to ride the momentum and raise a serious new funding round that could enable Tidal to compete with the likes of Apple Music and Spotify. 

Tidal is to a certain extent limited by its ownership structure: streaming is becoming big business and so it would only make sense for the handful of artists who own a direct share in the company to provide it with exclusives in the hope of seeing the value of that share go up. Artists who are not part of the “inner circle” are better off striking a deal with Apple Music or just making their release available across all streaming services for maximum effect. 

Tidal has managed to thrive thanks to high-profile releases, can it keep the momentum going for the rest of 2016? 

(Andrea Leonelli)