Newsletter
It’s been a year since Jay Z and other big shot artists made a decision to take over Tidal. And just in time for its one-year anniversary with the streaming service, the group is happily celebrating a year’s worth of massive exclusive content collection and its lossless audio option. Not to mention, the group is celebrating its 3-million subscriber list. This number has increased greatly compared to the first million, which they announced last fall. For sure, the biggest reasons for the increase of subscribers has to do with the releases Tidal exclusively made available to their paid plans, particularly Kanye West‘s “The Life of Pablo.” But even though the streaming service is seeing great progress, it has a lot to do so it is able to catch up to the number of subscribers on Spotify (30 million) and Apple Music (11 million).
Comparing to these streaming services, Tidal boasts of a collection of 40 million songs in its library. They also provide concert livestreams, video, and fan events to their subscribers. Including the exclusive releases previously mentioned, there’s no surprise why this streaming service is getting the attention it deserves. On the first 10 days since it was available, Kanye’s “Pablo” was streamed a surprising 250 million times. Another impressive accomplishment the service was able to make was that in less than 24 hours since it was released, Rihanna’s ANTI album had a total of 1.4 million downloads. All these wouldn’t have been possible if not for new material being streamed through Tidal before anything else. Particularly for artists directly involved with the company, Tidal has been the streaming service they use to debut their new material ever since Jay Z’s acquisition. Even though the tracks become available to other services in a few weeks, subscribers wouldn’t be able to hear it anywhere else other than Tidal.
Coinciding with its 3-million subscriber mark, Tidal has unveiled that 45 percent of its users are under the $20 HiFi plan. This number has left the company a generalization that there are more subscribers who are willing to pay to get high-fidelity audio. Despite these however, Tidal’s subscriber list is still far from reaching that of its competitors. Perhaps they should consider offering more exclusive content that will establish their popularity in an ever-competitive market.