Tidal, the music streaming service bought for $56 million and relaunched by Jay Z earlier this year, seemed like it had everything going for it in its battle with rival services, such as Pandora and Spotify.

It had technical superiority; unlike those other services, Tidal streams music at the near-CD quality level of 1411 kilobytes per second. (Spotify streams at either 96, 160 or 320 kbps.)

It had star power, as became clear at the March 30 launch (pictured, above).

And it had a compelling narrative: Tidal was going to rescue artists from the clutches of those other services, which it claimed pay a mere pittance for streams.

Fast forward a month, and the app is a tanking embarrassment. According to App Annie rankings watched eagerly by developers, Tidal fell out of the top 500 most downloaded apps in the U.S. on April 18. Three days later, it had dropped to No. 870. A rumor began the next day that Beyonce and Jay Z would launch an album exclusively on the service; that only got Tidal back up to No. 664 in the charts.

Take heart, Jay Z — Tidal is still in the top 100 apps in Norway, the country where its parent company started.

Pandora and Spotify, meanwhile, end the month exactly where they started: as the 7th and 15th most downloaded app in the U.S., respectively.

What went wrong? Plenty. Not only did Tidal botch just about every aspect of its marketing message, the app seems to have been hampered by its technology, its $19.99-a-month price, the loss of its CEO, a distinct lack of support from the artists who stood up for it on March 30, and a distinct hammering from artists who didn't.

Problem 1: Technology

Perhaps the greatest problem Tidal faced was the fact that its technological advantage in playback didn't matter — that it can, in many of the everyday music-listening circumstances in which we find ourselves, be a drawback.

Streaming music on your commute? Have to listen to a particular track immediately, while you're walking down the street? Then get ready to wait now, while the track buffers over your cellular connection, and pay later — in the form of more usage on your data package.

A single track encoded at 1411 kbps is going to have a size somewhere in the range of 30 to 50MB. That's for one song. Considering that most low-end data plans are in the range of 1GB a month — 1,000MB, in other words, for everything you download and stream — you can see why using Tidal on the go would send you into overage territory, especially if you want to save a few tracks for offline listening.

Either that, or you're going to be spending an awful lot of time downloading albums on Wi-Fi before you leave for work in the morning. And that's different from the iPod Shuffle how, exactly?

The whole premise of Tidal's high-priced service is that you can tell the difference between 1411 kbps and 320 kbps. Most of us can't — and if you're wondering whether you're one of the lucky few, try this fiendishly difficult blind test of five tracks encoded at both quality levels. It was devised, oddly enough, by Tidal itself. But even some audiophiles have a hard time getting five out of five on the test.

If you're using top-of-the-range headphones and have top-of-the-range hearing, Tidal might be worth the extra $10 its monthly subscription will cost you, versus Spotify. If not, you're better off with Spotify for a number of reasons, not least of which because it lets you stream music at 96 kbps, 160 kbps or 320 kbps.

For many of us music lovers, this is a Goldilocks situation, where 96 kbps is too low quality to enjoy, 320 kbps takes too long to buffer or download, and 160 kbps is just right. But at its lower end, Tidal only offers 96 kbps or 320 kbps — no middle ground.

Problem 2: We don't care

In any case, so much focus on high-end music quality presupposes that's what we aspire to — that music is a commodity like smartphones, a market where you're more likely to want a pricier iPhone because it's widely regarded as the best.

But that's just not how we experience music. It's a very imaginative realm of human experience where our brains are doing most of the work. Listen to what the Guardian's music editor had to say during a recent test of track compressions, because it speaks to the experience of just about anyone who isn't a high-end audiophile:

My favourite method of listening to music is with headphones while walking -– it’s while doing this that I fully lose myself in the music. But it’s never the precise sound I’m interested in, more the way it transports me emotionally to another daydream universe. It takes me away, rather than draws me in. And the truth is, I find the impressionistic sound of an MP3 just as effective at providing this emotional hit as the photographic realism of a studio master recording.

One might understand the Tidal approach if its library had plenty of the kind of music that tends to appeal to older, wealthier audiophiles who care about the tiniest nuance: classical and jazz. But it doesn't. The app has a lot of "Top 101 Classical Music Masterpieces" or "Jazz Essentials"-type compilation albums. In short, Spotify leaves the Tidal offerings in both of these areas in the dust.

But hey, at least you can listen to Taylor Swift in her full CD-quality glory.

Problem 3: Artists' impressions

The March 30 launch of Tidal in New York City was a baffling event in many ways. Alicia Keys quoted Nietzsche in a rambling speech that vaguely promised a "whole new era." Coldplay's Chris Martin appeared via Skype for no apparent reason. Madonna threw her leg over the table while signing the Tidal "declaration," and awkwardly hugged Deadmau5 after failing to connect with a high-five (to be fair, it's hard to see in that mouse helmet). Everyone on stage stood around awkwardly. None of the artists seemed to know what to do next after signing the declaration, and then the lights simply went out — a bad omen for the new service.

But from a public-relations perspective, the launch was an absolute disaster for a different reason. Here they were, these chart-topping multimillionaires — many of whom have transcended the need for more than one name — trying to tell us they were sticking up for the little guy, the poor hardworking indie artists.

If the superrich, super-famous Tidal 16 had really wanted to send a message that they were sticking up for artists, they should have stood on stage with hundreds of them. The optics would have been incredible: a grassroots army of artists, and they're coming for you, Spotify!

Instead, the optics of the event left the lineup open to a line of attack that they just didn't care; that they were simply becoming another kind of music industry boss. The attacks came not from their rivals, but from slightly less famous members of their own tribe.

Lily Allen was first out of the gate. Here's part of a 20-tweet rant on the topic of Tidal that she shared with her 5 million followers:

A REAL REVOLUTION YEAH...........GUYS............GUYS.............USHER?..........MADGE....... DAFT PUNKS ?? GUYS ???????? *WAVES AT YACHT* — lily (@lilyallen) March 31, 2015

By making the price of the service so high and offering exclusives on it, Tidal would be sending people "swarming back to pirate sites in droves" for free music, Allen argued.

also, unless TIDAL start sending everyone good quality headphones, the resolution thing is kinda redundant. — lily (@lilyallen) March 31, 2015

maybe I'm missing something, and really its amazing and will change everything for the better, but, yeah i must be missing something — lily (@lilyallen) March 31, 2015

Tidal's Twitter account fired back against critics like Allen, claiming that because the company would be paying 75% of its income to artists via their labels, it was superior to Spotify. But Spotify pays 70% of its income to the same sources.

And as Allen pointed out, the 16 artists who invested would be double-dipping into Tidal's revenue — not only getting a nice chunk of the 75% paid out, but any profits from the remainder.

maybe I'm missing something, and really its amazing and will change everything for the better, but, yeah i must be missing something — lily (@lilyallen) March 31, 2015

Some 10 days later, Mumford and Sons piled on the anti-Tidal rhetoric. The 16 celebrity owners were "new school f*cking plutocrats,” guitarist Winston Marshall told The Daily Beast.

"When they say it’s artist-owned, it’s owned by those rich, wealthy artists," said lead singer Marcus Mumford. "What I’m not into is the tribalistic aspect of it —people trying to corner bits of the market, and put their face on it."

Death Cab for Cutie lead singer Ben Gibbard had much the same thing to say: "They totally blew it by bringing out a bunch of millionaires and billionaires and propping them up onstage, and then having them all complain about not being paid," he told the Beast.

Meanwhile, one member of the Tidal 16 seemed to be keen to take his face off the whole project. By April 22, as Digital Spy first noted, Kanye West had deleted all mentions of Tidal from his feed, including removing the logo from his avatar.

West sent out a pro-Tidal tweet shortly after the Digital Spy story dropped. But it was too late to walk back the service's bad publicity. Yeezy was protesting too much, and few fans failed to notice.

Problem 4: Management

Around the same time as West was busily removing Tidal references from his feed, Andy Chen — CEO of Tidal's Scandinavian parent company Aspiro, on which Jay Z spent the big bucks — was unceremoniously ousted.

Chen's departure on April 18 was part of what Aspiro called a "streamlining," as another 24 employees were shown the door. A company rep said it was "streamlining resources to ensure talent is maximized to enhance the customer experience," a statement almost as hard to decipher as Alicia Keys' speech.

Aspiro described Chen's replacement, Peter Tonstad, as an "interum [sic]" CEO. Tonstad, a former consultant for the Norwegian Ministry of Environment, is actually returning to a role he held before Chen came along. But nobody knows how long he'll remain in the role, leaving even more fear, uncertainty and doubt hanging over Tidal.

What Tonstad had to bring to the party, and why new boss Jay Z had more faith in him than Chen, wasn't immediately clear. Aspiro said Tonstad was tasked with ensuring "talent is maximized to enhance the customer experience." We're sure that will bring the indie artists flocking.