Is Tidal the Next Big Thing in Music Streaming?

If you’ve managed to spend your Monday under a rock, you might not have noticed a slew of big-name celebrities tweeting with #TIDALforALL and confusing the fuck out of everyone. Turns out, Jay Z is re-launching the music streaming service Tidal. The service previously differentiated itself by offering super high quality streaming, but with Jay Z and powerful friends like Alicia Keys and Madonna behind it, is becoming an entirely new ball game.

Apparently big name musicians have had it with how third party businesses treat their music. Streaming companies such as Spotify take significant margins on artists' music sales, distribution, and online streaming. These same artists are beyond over it and are taking matters into their own hands by cutting out the middleman.

Jay Z’s position as the owner of Tidal wasn’t only for recognition purposes. His agency, Roc Nation, works with long lists of musicians to provide publishing, label, management, guidance and other services. Tidal will now become Roc Nation’s premium one-stop music distribution shop, adding another cart to the long list of services.

Entering an already competitive market, Tidal offers a more attractive set of terms to, agreeing to payouts twice as much as its rivals. (Cue visions of Taylor Swift still flipping Spotify off).

Speaking of Ms. Swift, her catalog is currently streaming on Tidal, and as of Tuesday morning, most of her albums were there too. This is just one of her steps in advocating for music streaming services that compensate artists better than Spotify.

If you visit the site right now, you can subscribe to Tidal Premium for $9.99 a month. This will let you listen to music, watch high definition music videos, and read expertly curated editorials on new musicians, albums, and other music related topics. For $19.99 a month you can do all the same stuff but with “Lossless” High Fidelity sound quality.

You’re probably thinking what the fuck is “Lossless” and why would I sacrifice dollars that could be being spent on Chipotle? Apparently, Lossless sound quality has a fully detailed, richer sound. Now for all you non-music engineers out there, when music is recorded and then converted into smaller mp3 files, some sound, beats, trims and “detail” are lost. Don’t believe me? Take a listen in their explanation.

So now you know what all this hype is about. What do you think? Don’t you want to find out what music was truly meant to sound like? And why not give a movement that fights against the money-and-creativity-sucking-big-corporations a chance? #Anarchy!