Boils down to a bunch of rich assholes complaining they don't get enough money from other streaming sites.
-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
Jay-Z takes to Twitter to damage control Tidal rollout
- Thread starter RastaMentality
- Start date
- Status
Boils down to a bunch of rich assholes complaining they don't get enough money from other streaming sites.
Its Jay Z and hating Madonna cause shes old. Got people really upset for no reason basically.
AyaisMUsikWhore
Member
I don't even understand this comment. Spotify is a BBC. Itunes is a BBC. Pandora is a BBC. Google is a BBC. You make it seem like all these other services where made off the poor backs of some college students who made an idea on how they were going to take back the music from the industry that has ruined them for years to come. They are all apart of the same circle and play by the same rules in the industry on who and what they can offer to anyone.
Originality or not, its about convenience. It's about accessibility. It's about offering what others do not include with their own service. Why should i put my music through tunecore to upload to Spotify if I can directly upload it without the help of such service to the service I want. No sign up, no hassle, no gimmicks. You know, sort of like a legal soundcloud, but should soundcloud be unoriginal because TuneCore existed first? Wtf
Thirdly, Google allows uploads because it doubles over as a music marketplace where you can by music. Obviously, it's different than Spotify on a whole other level where as you can't do that with Spotify because you technically don't own the music you are listening too.....But of course, for all other perks with Google, you still need to pay $10 as there's no free option. Go figure. And essentially, you can download all your music as one large playlist but I guess that's too hard.
No they don't and I do not understand where you are getting this idea that they do. To add your music on Spotify, you need to go to a third party, in which you have to pay to get your stuff listed. It does not work like soundcloud where you upload and go. There is a middleman there and this has been echoed by a lot of indie artist. Sure they keep their royalties but having to go through an aggressor is still an unnecessary step that doesn't equate it as being convenient. There is still a middleman. Until there is a direct to host then we are talking, which only one seems to be trying to do
Next, this industry attempt BS is still some notion you cooked up to convince yourself that this service is still nothing but a sheep in wolves clothing, which it isn't. All streaming service has to answer to labels. Even spotify themselves. Spotify free isn't so free as it is and that Ads revenue has to go to somewhere. However if Sony, Universal and other choose to pull out, trust and believe that Spotify will have to play ball. I can't understand this talk as if we are the artist themselves who really know what's going on when we certainly don't. The free option isn't going anywhere anytime soon, but that doesn't mean that every other service including Beats Music will be someway to kill free. Free isn't free as it is.
It's not right to blame consumers for the the way the industry goes but I still compare it to labels of all industries. Take a look at the gaming industry. Some people do need the help of labels to even get their feet in the door, whether that be with funding etc. Indie games have their place in the industry but at the same time, it's largely unavoidable that when the money isn't there to put your art in the place it needs to be, the help is only a call and a contract away. At that point, you can't blame the industry when consumers aren't consuming enough and still are under that mentality that just because they work hard, they should receive someone elses hard work for free. It's not fair..
Tornado Condor
Member
Wow, talk about ridiculous. Do they not know what spotify is?
Wind's Howling
Member
Jay Z's talk about his experience with his so called "audience" and stating that they said it took so damn long before anything like Tidal got brought into their existence. Shameless that is. Just shameless.
Spotify has been present for years, almost a decade, but because the likes of Beyonce and Madonna feel that they deserve 50 million instead of 40 they are supporting this so called "new wave".
It is just rich people wanting to become richer over the backs of people who actually listen to their music, instead of downloading it from a torrent. They should be glad that Spotify is present or else piracy would have just become more and more frequent if people want to listen to their music.
Winterfang
Banned
I though this was just a premium service, that let you hear lossless audio and cap your monthly data in two hours.
cartoon_soldier
Member
It was a badly rolled out service. Artists that are multimillionaires were complaining about how they are not receiving enough money. It's the same crap as Taylor Swift complaining about spotify.
There is no free tier.
The thing services like Spotify, Pandora did was help bring down piracy. Tidal does not do that.
For a service that is supposed to be about Artists there was a big lack of transparency too. I heard artists receive 62.5%, now the tweets say 75%.
The service is about this group of millionaire musicians wanting to make more money for each song trying to make it seem they are helping artists not as wealthy as them.
I think indie artists lose when songs libraries are distributed across four platforms.
The world stops to make fun of how lame he is maybe
That ether still burns his soul
And his business Ventures apparently
Yes they can.
There are a range of aggregators including ones where independent artists keep 100% of the royalties. Aggregators also get the artist on every service in one go, from streaming to downloads where the artist benefits more. As well as cataloging everything correctly so there are no duplicates, differing names, and other things that made hinder people finding stuff.
Digital distributors are not a problem, they are actually beneficial. Both to the artist and the listener. Uploading to a single service isn't a selling point especially a streaming service such as Tidal where the majority of the money will automatically go the labels because of the weight of their artists and back catalogues. Streaming services serve the labels, that's why the labels own part of them, and Tidal is a really disingenuous spin to put on all that.
For small acts streaming is most useful for exposure, and a free service provides the most exposure of all. This translates into popularity and ticket/merch sales, which is the way you should be rewarding the artists you like as has always been the way. If people aren't on free streaming sites they'd only be discovering the music they were already looking for.
You are eating up the spin, but really all this is about is putting pressure to end free streaming because the industry knows it's the future and wants as much from that as possible. Any new entrant into the field from Tidal to Apple is automatically part of this.
All the talk from Tidal is just an artist-friendly front on an industry-wide anti-consumer move. It's pure marketing. Even though the industry put this model in place, has benefitted very nicely from it and will do so even more as it grows, and would much rather just blame the consumer than change any of the ways they do business. This has always happened with the record industry, from cassette tapes, to iTunes, to now streaming. Something is always the enemy except the industry itself.
Market a better service that people will pay for over others if you have one, but don't try and pretend it's something which it isn't.
exmachina64
Banned
It was originally, but after that didn't work, a new management team came in and started the current strategy you see in this thread. Instead of focusing on audio quality as the center of the experience, the "new" Tidal is marketing itself as healthier for artists than streaming services such as Pandora and Spotify.
Up to this point, it has failed to gain traction and is seen as an attempt by established artists to increase the revenue they obtain from streaming services.
Tornado Condor
Member
Definitely agree with you. The video left me speechless. Seems like the rich just want to get richer
AyaisMUsikWhore
Member
Again, the point is the remove the aggressor. Aggressors require fees, and don't have the tools that other embedded services do. They get your music out there but the analytics behind it is seriously lacking, and that is not control or beneficial. Yes, it's a wholesale service, but lacks quality and depth. All the rest of the stuff you mentioned are basic features that even Windows Media has.
I don't know where you get this idea that uploading your stuff that you can control on individual areas aren't a selling point. If TuneCore or whomever gets hacked and your data across multiple sites are compromised, at least having everything seperate can be very beneficial. Having a backup everywhere is beneficial period.
And you are still missing the point that unless you are a big named artist that has a label behind you, as an indie artist, you are benefiting more than the typical artist, in which that 75% figure will still go to the individual. You keep trying to argue that Tidal is taking everything away from everyone big and small when it's a flat rate on everyone without favoritism. Its not like the label gets 75% and the indie just 50%. It's flat.
Yes, of course for exposure purposes it does help, but so does paying the bills. Let's stop making this seem like this can only be acceptable in music but everywhere else it can't work. If indie devs in gaming need an honest wage for their creation, then so does artist. Free isn't the answer regardless of exposure. I have some artist on Spotify that have less than 50,000 streams and regardless of free, they are not benefitting the same as bigger artist who have more than 1Mil+ streams and for whom most "free" users are listening to.
I'm not eating the spin but reading the facts. Only you and a few have convinced yourself that any service that has a monetary value behind it is out to kill another competitor when that is not what it means at all. Competition helps the artist more than they are suppose to just help the consumer. Sucking up Spotify, once again, as the end all be all is going to be a problem, because essentially no one is allowing artist to have another way out. Free shouldn't be free if it wasn't free for the person who made their music. I think adding a bunch of already established artist is the only thing they did wrong...but as far as offering a bigger cut for all artist even if signed by a label is I think the big part of this service.
Wanting this to fail is expecting Spotify to dramatically up how much they are paying artist, big and small and giving them no incentive to do so. I don't care for how many time Spotify has said "We've dished out 700 million to Spotify artist worldwide" when knowing that the library of music on that sites worth far exceeds that number. I'm saying that competition is perfectly fine and at the end of the day, Mumford and Son, nor Marina or whomever can dictate how much other outside of their already growing fanbase what good for anyone including us. I think it should have time, just like other service to offer what others do not and that's what I'm waiting for. This non free argument was not made for any other service but Tidal which is so ridiculous. So i'll wait and see.
And it's funny how she isn't even a part of Tidal with all the complaining she did
Bluekaveli
Member
Fuck Jay-Z
What's up fellas.
Fuck Jay-Z
What's up fellas.
Fuck Jay-Z
Liu Kang Baking A Pie
Member
1. Steals Spotify's design. The genre icons/avatars are the same thing.
2. Rich musicians complaining about money.
3. The application itself is far behind the competition.
4. But it costs more anyway.
Winterfang
Banned
Thank You, is more about supporting the artists you more. So they can get a bit more per son than with the opposing stream options, except people don't like it because they are already very popular. I guess, I'm not too sure ^_^U
Suikoguy
I whinny my fervor lowly, for his length is not as great as those of the Hylian war stallions
These guys still make PLENTY on spotify. Its the indies who get screwed but still. I have a friend whos a small artist who earns $5000 a quarter and he hasnt even put out an album yet. Amd all the major labels got way better royality deals than indoes. Sure it aint the good old days but its still good.
cartoon_soldier
Member
Oh yea I forgot about the twitter campaign with changing the logo.
smh
smh
lol, it really can be distilled to that.
cartoon_soldier
Member
These artists have a lot of fans + free trial. Makes sense to me.
cartoon_soldier
Member
Yupp.
The industry is not perfect by any means, but labels used to fuck artists to a much higher degree in the "good old days".
Time to post the classic The Problem with Music (circa 1993) again
Whenever labels complain about how they're really concerned that the internet hurts the artists I just roll my eyes.
The current model is just better.
Not perfect, but much better.
I give up.
If you can't see how it's just window dressing then there's not much anyone can say. It's pure marketing, just marketing that fell flat on its face and is now scrambling to justify all that talk. Overstating the problems that are there and ignoring the ones that will remain.
The majors have openly stated their desire to kill free streaming, just like they put pressure on Apple once iTunes took off to end fixed pricing because they saw that as an opportunity to make more. Ironically the labels that then raised prices saw total revenue fall. The model that the consumer embraced in the first place was actually the right one.
You will always have a proportion of people not paying for anything, that's always been the case with music, the trick is to get as many to pay for it as possible. Something Spotify has actually managed really well, and has far offset the money lost from a shrinking download market. Each person subscribing to Spotify is spending double what the average person spent on music at its peak, and this will continue to grow.
All streaming has done is highlight how unfair the industry already was, prompting the industry to try and shift that blame back to the consumer as an excuse to take more money.
And when communicated by a bunch of artists made by those practices it backfired spectacularly.
exmachina64
Banned
As has previously been covered in the thread, there's a disconnect between how Tidal marketed itself as in the now-infamous "draft day" promotional videos and the reality of how it's structured.
If Tidal was primarily for artists in the music industry as a whole rather than increasing profits for established musicians (see the Taylor Swift Spotify controversy), they would have had mechanisms in place for the promotion and discovery of smaller and independent musicians in the first place.
Instead, their efforts to promote smaller artists came as a result of backlash to their original strategy.
If the artists assembled in the promotional videos had come forward for more of a sincere effort to "focus on the music" and promote rising talent, we'd have met these efforts with less cynicism and backlash for its failings.
The marketing scheme for Tidal from Jay-Z kind of feels parallel to that of Lebron James announcing he was going to the Miami Heat.
They both literally didn't realize how poorly their announcements would convey to the public eye. They were given extremely poor advice, and didn't see the downside to it, which is absurd because these two situations seem crystal clear as to why someone would say that is the absolute worst way of handling it. It isn't necessarily that they have bad intentions, it's that they are seriously delusional to the fact of what they did wrong. There is obviosuly nothing wrong with wanting to play for another team or create a new business venture, but to do it in the fashion that these people did it is what is so troubling.
After seeing this tweets from Jay-Z it's evident that he still literally doesn't understand at all.
They both literally didn't realize how poorly their announcements would convey to the public eye. They were given extremely poor advice, and didn't see the downside to it, which is absurd because these two situations seem crystal clear as to why someone would say that is the absolute worst way of handling it. It isn't necessarily that they have bad intentions, it's that they are seriously delusional to the fact of what they did wrong. There is obviosuly nothing wrong with wanting to play for another team or create a new business venture, but to do it in the fashion that these people did it is what is so troubling.
After seeing this tweets from Jay-Z it's evident that he still literally doesn't understand at all.
Zantetsuken
Member
God Son across the belly. I proved you lost already.
It's going to be interesting watching Apple's launch.
I think somehow they will be selling the value of the service, not telling off the consumers.
RastaMentality
Banned
Well it'll most likely be at WWDC as a feature of the 8.4 update with a presentation from Iovine probably like many of their past features have been. I doubt there'll any broad statements about changing the tides of earth and its oceans.
theignoramus
Member
Nerds dont like piousness from business companies. Saw the same backlash with Sony in 06 and Microsoft in 2012. I havnt seen a minute of the press conference (just saw a clip of Madonna behaving like a prostitute) so I had no feeling either way.
The service is fine, they just need to get on top of the app crashing and expand the library. I kind of like that its a bit snooty and highbrow, it's reflected in the "avante garde" playlists they put together.
theignoramus
Member
It really should have been marketed as the niche service it is, not like it was some godsend for the unwashed masses. Now it will take years to wash away the stench of their PR misfire, if their service even exists that long. But for what it's worth, I hope it does. Im especially intrigued about "live sports" and what exactly that implies.
What artists really should be doing is go on strike like in 1942-1944. I guess they don't because they're afraid they'll be replaced by younger talent?
By doing what exactly? What does this look like?
- Status