This week saw the launch of TIDAL, Jay-Z’s answer to other streaming services such as Spotify. With the market becoming hugely saturated with different services, each claiming that they offer users the best experience for users, can it really compete with the best of them?

TIDAL launched with a unique selling point; offering music fans the option of streaming lossless, high quality music. To the casual music fan, this may not seem like a huge issue. The vast majority of the music-listening public probably wouldn’t even notice that services such as Spotify are of less than CD-quality unless they have high quality equipment to listen to it on.

Most people may not even be aware that streaming services that we have been used to are of a lower quality; I certainly wasn’t but there is a very good reason for this. By compressing the size of a music file, they are keeping the costs of streaming way down and this is reflected in the price they charge their customers.

The increase in quality provided by TIDAL is reflected in the price that they charge their customers. TIDAL charge £19.99 for their high quality service, double what they, and many other services charge for standard quality. That seems like a pretty steep price difference for something that may not even bother the average music fan.

TIDAL have another selling point which isn’t necessarily a huge one for fans but nevertheless is hugely important for the industry. They emphasise the fact that the service is run by artists for artists with a much larger proportion of royalties being paid to the people responsible for making music. This is obviously great for the industry and eventually users will feel the benefits however, if this service is abused then all it will end up doing is lining the pockets of the already wealthy heavy weights in music.

The main issue that many established artists have with most streaming services is that they don’t earn what they feel they should from their music being accessible through them. Whilst I agree that artist should be adequately compensated for their music being listened to, I don’t think users should be forced to pay more for a service that will benefit only a few of the most powerful people in music, under the guise of being offered a better service.
Of course, if the quality of the music you listen to matters that much to you then TIDAL is surely the answer to your prayers but having a smaller catalogue than services such as Spotify, I think that many of the music listening public will be just as well sticking to their current music outlet.