As TIDAL relaunches today, we’re beginning to see the rollout of their press and media campaigns, including an all-star ad with cameos from every genres imaginable.
Though the ad lacks inherent substance – there’s nothing that’s being directly advertised or shown or marketed – the simple act of attendance from Daft Punk, Jack White, Kanye West, Beyoncé, Rihanna, Coldplay’s Chris Martin, Madonna, Arcade Fire, and others is a large enough statement and endorsement to show that something big is about to happen.
TIDAL’s lossless streaming quality is likely its biggest attraction; but how much of a difference will FLAC provide compared to 320kbps MP3? Not really that much. The average consumers, and even self-proclaimed audiophiles, are extremely unlikely to be able to tell the difference between MP3 and FLAC without extremely high performance audio equipment.
Storing your music in lossless is great for futureproofing your library (since you can convert it to any other file type without losing quality), but if you’re looking to get the most out of listening to your music, you might be fine sticking with 320kbps MP3s.
The endgame for the streaming service will likely depend on how these artists market their music to other streaming platforms. One rumor is that artists will begin to pull their music from Spotify, à la Taylor Swift, but the likeliness of that isn’t very good overall. To be sure, music’s top dogs are putting their support behind this service and simply because of that fact, users will begin to flock in. But we will see how many make it past the 30-day free trial in 30 days. My bet is that it won’t be as many as they would hope.
This afternoon, Tidal signed a declaration with artists to bring a new streaming platform that will shape the future of streaming. You can check out the conference here:
