Apple has an awful lot of money – $216 billion (but it’s complicated) at the last count – so why not consider a good old-fashioned acquisition? Well, that’s something the company is actively considering, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Apple Music is growing, but not fast enough. It has around 15 million paying subscribers, which is impressive, but is just half of what Spotify has – and that doesn’t factor in the additional 70 million non-paying customers that the streaming top dog also boasts. Meanwhile, Tidal claims it has three million, still leaving the combined numbers some way short of the Swedish giant.

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But that’s looking at things in a unfairly simplistic manner. Tidal’s charm is the exclusive content it has from the artists who have a stake in it. It was the only place you could stream Kanye West’s Life of Pablo for some time, and it’s still the only place you can stream Lemonade – Beyonce’s visual album. Apple Music has also chased the exclusives, including Drake’s most recent album.

While these names aren’t of great interest to someone like me – who believes Britpop isn’t dead, merely sleeping – these kind of exclusives are seriously appealing to the kind of people Apple wants to tempt away from Spotify, and it’s entirely possible that Apple and Tidal together could be greater than the sum of their already pretty substantial parts.

See related Apple Music review: Apple joins the streaming game Apple paying labels $0.002 per stream during free Apple Music trial Taylor Swift’s open letter sparks Apple Music U-turn over royalties So, how much would Apple have to take from their Scrooge McDuck-style mountain of cash? Well, when Jay Z purchased Tidal just over a year ago, it cost $56 million. Given the investment and growth it has seen under his ownership, you’d imagine the price will have only gone upwards.

It’s pocket money to Apple, of course, but the company didn’t get to the position it’s in today by being profligate. If the deal does go ahead, Spotify will have to acknowledge that Apple is serious about music streaming – and given the number of its subscribers that use an iPhone, they should probably be ready for a fight.

Images: Pieter-Jannick Dijkstra and Mike Deerkoski used under Creative Commons