Hey, remember TIDAL? Yeah…neither do we. After a month of non-stop media attention and speculation, the celebrity owned stream service stopped making headlines, until now.
Aspiro Group (TIDAL’s parent company) has announced that their interim CEO Peter Tonstad is no longer with them, after only two months of taking the job from Andy Chen back in April. This isn’t Tonstad’s first time leaving the company – he was one of Aspiro Group’s CEOs well before Jay-Z and his parade of millionaire artists stepped in. Though it was revealed that Jay-Z had to replace the CEO and board members as a part of the takeover, it was Tonstad who took things a step further by saying Chen lacked a clear vision for the company’s success. It’s been reported that their interim CEO quit, but TIDAL has neither confirmed nor denied the reasons behind his exit.
I feel like I’m playing a broken record here, reporting on misstep after misstep, but when you make a public spectacle and say you’re going to dramatically change your industry, you better be damn well sure you can deliver both in full and in a timely manner (I’m looking at you, Miami Heat and your seven NBA titles with Lebron James). So far the streaming service has been criticized for being too expensive, having poor app functionality, and coming off as arrogant with major artists leading the helm instead of independent ones. Added to losing Drake for Apple Music, Kanye West mysteriously deleting all tweets about TIDAL, and Beyonce’s team threatening to pull out of the deal, TIDAL is set to fade back into nothingness. But even with the streaming game looking like the Wild West at the moment, they’re still a player worth chatting about, and we’ll continue to keep our eye out as we see fit.
Source: NY Daily News
