Jay-Z Relaunches Tidal ft. Kanye Exclusives

Here’s a top tip from us on building a great music streaming service: If you don’t have Kanye, you don’t have a music service. Simple as that.

Jay-Z’s got the right idea, as he recently re-branded and unveiled a brand new iteration of his previous Tidal music streaming service, and thankfully some Yeezy exclusives were also in tow, along with Daft Punk and Madonna also contributing tracks exclusive to the service.

Tidal is expected to be a much more helpful service for artists – Jay-Z’s approach is to attract investment from performers into his service, and then give back to them by offering double what most streaming services like Spotify offer in payment for songs. In return users can count on artists staying put and not losing or missing out on tracks.

[Muffled "New Slaves" playing from inside Kanye's head] — There were some photos of Kanye smiling at the Tidal announcement, but to be honest they seemed out of character. We used this one instead. Jay-Z looks happy though.

One of the biggest gripes currently from artists is the minuscule payment offered by streaming services as opposed to CD sales and digital downloads. Taylor Swift jumped ship with Spotify possibly due to this issue – she’s on board with Tidal now.

Many artists turned up at the Tidal announcement – Nicki Minaj, Rihanna and Beyonce represented for the ladies, and alongside Yeezus popular performers such as Deadmau5, Calvin Harris and Usher were also spotted. Tidal is presenting itself as a music platform with will clap back at the likes of Spotify, as well as Apple’s ominous upcoming Beats audio service.

Digital piracy, power hungry record labels and rival streaming services that don’t seem to care are all in Tidal’s crosshairs – the service wants to be a platform for artists, funded by artists.

Of course, it has been said that Tidal does look an awful lot like Spotify by die hard fans of the service – whether it is somehow in breach of any kind of copyright is debatable, but it’s not really that big of a deal. Most music players of yore tended to look the same anyway.

You can head over to Tidal.com after watching the inspiring video above to jump on board with the platform – it’s available for the price of $9.99 on a monthly subscription, but you can get hold of it for free on a trial basis or the first month at the link below.

At double the price, without a trial, you can subscribe to the high fidelity hi-fi version of Tidal, which offers better lossless high fidelity sound quality, if you’re into that sort of thing. Check it out below.

Get it @ Tidal.com

Via: The Verge