The infamous new streaming platform TIDAL has made the rounds on publications since its recent re-launch a few days ago. From criticizing the seemingly out-of-touch wealthy founders, to the high subscription cost without a free tier, almost everything about this platform has been discussed. While many weren’t surprised to see Madonna, Rihanna and other pop-stars join the ranks of Jay Z’s new venture, one individual that people weren’t expecting to see on that stage was Joel Zimmerman, more popularly known as deadmau5. The famous Canadian producer and vocal critic of the music industry, labels, EDM and everything in between, seemed out of place amongst the other individuals he claims to “loathe.”
deadmau5 recently streamed on Twitch for an extended 4-hour session, and used this opportunity to explain his reasoning behind joining the new platform as a founding partner. The crux of it all is that deadmau5 doesn’t support a label’s involvement when dealing with a streaming platform. Without naming any particular major labels, he does list the issues he sees with a company taking a cut of an artist’s royalties for essentially performing very few duties. Now, enter TIDAL. Deadmau5 sees TIDAL as an opportunity to cut out the unnecessary middleman that labels have become, so that the artists, especially independent ones, can have the ability to enter in a direct relationship with the streaming platform, thus minimizing royalty splits and loss of income for the artists. Now ultimately, consumers will be the judge of how successful this model will be; without any subscribers TIDAL will fail, but for now all we can do is wait and see how the platform evolves and impacts the music industry.
You can watch deadmau5’s explanation below. Skip to 1:17:00 if that’s all you want to see.
Image Source: Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images
