7 Points I Wish The Tidal Team Made

For those not living under a rock, Jay-Z presented Tidal, the industry’s first artist-owned music service on Monday at a press conference that has been widely mocked for being heavy on lip service and platitudes and extremely wanting in details.

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Jay spent a reported $56 million to buy Tidal from its Norwegian corporate parent Aspiro AB and there’s been a lot of speculation about what Tidal could be up to.

It’s premature to call it a failure (though the tech press didn’t have any qualms doing so) as we don’t know what Tidal is going to do. But without details, I was really wishing for more from 16 of the biggest names in the music business Monday. The fact is that an artist-run streaming service should have a different outlook at how a music service should function, from its relationship to listeners to how artists are compensated. Here’s a few suggestions for what Jay and team could have said.

“First and foremost, Tidal is going to complete the fan experience. Too often we’re asking our fans to do too much work and it hasn’t gotten easier in streaming. It’s gotten harder! I believe first and foremost that if we’re asking fans to pay for music, then we better be delivering a lot more value than just access to music. To that end, Tidal is going to focus on shortening that distance from the music fan and us, the artists.”
“Sharing music is a great way for our fans to show their love for our music. We’re going to make it extremely easy for fans to share music and enable playback of tracks in a limited way, regardless if someone is a Rdio, Pandora, iTunes or Spotify listener. Our project is called EasyShare and it requires all the services to cooperate so that it’s easier for our fans to share their love of music. It also supports all the services, since, let’s face it, people are using a little bit of everything these days.”
“Okay, we’re superstars. But it’s not easy for artists these days in all genres and levels of their career. We believe in fairness for all artists. We’re going to make sure that the way artists get paid in our streaming service works for everyone, from the superstar to the struggling artist. Right now it seems like payments for streaming seem like a ‘winner take all’ proposition. So we’ve asked leading economists to look at the pro-rata share of determining compensation to investigate if it really is the best way to pay artists.”
"We’ve informed the major labels that we want to renegotiate our contracts with them. Our number one priority is to make sure that more money from our service goes into the pockets of artists. So we’re going to add what we’re calling a ‘Transparency Clause’ into the contract that will require labels to quantify how much money they’ve received from us, and what percentage goes to artists. We believe this number will help artists understand the moneyflow and make sure that the billions streaming services are paying labels don’t turn into fractions of pennies for artists.”
"We also won’t sign non-disclosure clauses with any label and we will post the details of all of our deals so that the artist community knows exactly how much money is going into the coffers of labels for their content.”
“We believe in artists. And that’s just not performers, but also songwriters. So we’re going to help solve the problem of getting songwriters paid. Right now, music services like Tidal can only pay 70 percent of royalties because we just can’t identify who should get paid. We’ve earmarked $5 million that we’ll give to SoundExchange to develop a Global Rights Database. The database will endeavor to identify the publishing rights for every song in the world with the end goal of getting every single rightsholder paid for every play. We have calls later today with Daniel Ek, Doug Morris, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook and Lucian Grainge urging them to contribute to this extremely important endeavor.”
“We’re going to support artists by investing in causes that are important to them. Therefore, we’re going to contribute the money that Tidal paid us for exclusives to MusicCares, which helps artists who are in need of economic support often for medical problems. We’re asking our subscribers to join us in supporting this vital non-profit service.”