Rihanna and Beyoncé unveil new music via Tidal Read more

Over Easter, Lily Allen took to Twitter to critique Jay Z’s music streaming service Tidal. She’s not the the first person to oppose the opulence of its star-studded launch event last week, or to voice pessimism about its mantra of doing right by artists, but as a fellow songwriter – who, unlike Allen, is not a performer – I think she’s wrong in a number of ways.

First, Allen fears that not having an unlimited free tier “will send people back to pirate/torrent sites”. However, a major label executive recently told me that their statistics showed that if a user of the free version of Spotify hasn’t signed up for the paid-for tier within three months, they never will. The ad-funded version pays about the same as YouTube (ie next to nothing), so losing those users to YouTube isn’t much of a loss.

It’s understandable that users need to try out a streaming service for a while before they get hooked, but the ads on Spotify are mostly for other artists, and not frequent and annoying enough for most users to feel the need to upgrade (75% of Spotify users are on the free tier, a share that has remained steady for years). So musicians should support streaming services that limit the free usage period – preferably to about three months.



Also, even if the launch event was a shambles, the venom it unleashed in the media illustrates the catch-22 situation music creators find themselves in. Had it summoned a bunch of less successful artists to launch its streaming service, it would barely have had any media coverage at all – after all, how much coverage did Midge Ure’s digital music service that intended to treat artists fairly get?

Tidal: 10 things you need to know Read more

It’s also worth noting that Jay Z is one of the few artists that has the money to gamble on such a service. He can afford to lose some money. Surely if he wanted to make a quick buck, he could have gone into the headphone business, like Dr Dre, or some other venture that profits directly off the back of music. Almost all streaming services, including Spotify, claim they are not making a profit. One could argue that one of the main reasons Spotify isn’t profiting is because it’s spending money on expansion – which, of course, increases its worth in preparation for an IPO.

When the official Tidal Twitter account confirmed that 75% of its revenues would be paid back to the music industry, Allen tweeted:

No one expects an artist to be a math genius but, clearly, the remaining 25% is not profit, but will be used to run the actual service. Note that both Pandora and YouTube, which pay little more than 50% of their revenue from music to the music industry, claim they couldn’t afford to run their services if they paid more.



Tidal has existed in Scandinavia for quite some time, under the name WiMP (no prizes for guessing why the name was changed to go international). It was the first (and, so far, only one I know of) streaming service to add songwriter/producer credits to the records on its site. It was also the only streaming service that showed up to a meeting called by Swedish songwriters in February, in order to discuss giving the songwriters a more equitable share of streaming revenues – while Spotify cancelled at the last minute.

Perhaps most encouraging for songwriters is a recent interview Jay Z gave to Billboard. While Pandora and Spotify refuse to address – or even understand – why songwriters and producers are unhappy with them, Jay Z puts them at the centre of his plans for Tidal, mentioning them several times during the interview.





For someone like me, I can go on tour. But what about the people working on the record, the content creators and not just the artists? If they’re not being compensated properly, then I think we’ll lose some writers and producers and people like that who depend on fair trade. Some would probably have to take another job, and I think we’ll lose some great writers in the process. Is it fair? No. If you put in work, everyone else, you go to work you get paid. That’s fair trade. It’s what our country is built on. I’m just saying the producers and people who work on music are getting left out – that’s when it starts getting criminal. It’s like you’re working hard and you’re not receiving. In any other business people would be standing before Congress. They have anti-trust laws against this kind of behaviour. It almost seems like when it applies to music no one really cares who’s cheated. It’s so disorganised; it’s so disconnected from reality.

When asked what he would consider to be a success for Tidal, 12 months down the line, he answered: “If Aloe Blacc and his writers, the guys he wrote with, are not seeing a $4,000 cheque from 168m streams.”

Songwriters getting a bigger piece of the royalty pie is not an impossible quest – Denmark’s songwriters’ collection society, Koda, managed to get 40% of the royalties when digital music service TDC launched (though, sadly, when the licence was up for renewal, the major labels fought the songwriters, and managed to cut their share of royalties significantly).

In response to a question about whether he would have pursued music if streaming was “the pre-eminent revenue vehicle for recorded music” when he was starting out, Jay Z said: “Maybe. But I think that the people that work behind the scenes maybe wouldn’t have.”

Of course, Jay Z currently has to abide by whatever licensing deals were already in place when he bought Tidal, and we won’t be able to truly judge if he’ll live up to his promises of fairness and transparency until those are renegotiated, but it is difficult to imagine Spotify’s chief executive, Daniel Ek, saying any of the above.

I’d rather have my music on a service that is majority-owned by music creators, rather than owned by venture capitalists looking for a quick turnaround on their investment, hoping to be able to cash out with a big IPO payday.



You only need to look at the major record labels, who now have to answer to shareholders wanting a quick return on their investments, to see what happens when it’s all about share value. It’s anathema to creativity and the kind of risk-taking that is required to invest in music people don’t yet know they want to listen to.

