In a world where streaming music is the new normal, are priced services able to thrive against it’s comparable competitors which offer free platforms, such as Spotify, Pandora and YouTube?

 

Rap mogul Jay-Z is attempting to combat these free music services with his new music-streaming platform, Tidal.

Tidal’s website explains it as the first of its kind to offer high fidelity sound quality, high definition music videos and expertly-curated editorials.

The service costs $19.99 per month and does not offer a free option.

Though it attempts to be inventive and innovative, much of the public is backlashing for multiple reasons: price, morals, and authenticity. When asked how Tidal is going to affect young adult’s perspectives, Sacramento State student Andrew Pasquini had a definite opinion.

“I like Imagine Dragons,” Pasquini said. “I could buy their album once and then it would be mine, as for if I went to Tidal I would have to continue paying for that specific album more than once even if I could either pay for it once or get it free on other music services.”

Pasquini represents most when saying that none want to pay for music, especially young people. Having a service that costs a high price with no free option is tough to gain appeal, unless a revolutionary idea.

Despite the celebrities showing support on Twitter and other social media platforms, musicians such as Madonna, Rihanna, and Kanye West keep what do you mean by keep? most skeptical of Tidal’s functionality and necessity.

With the high cost of a Tidal subscription, this has the ability to tempt a wide range of audiences into using piracy sites for music again, recalling back to an era when Napster, Limewire, and Megashare thrived.

Sac Sate student Joshua Rios supports this notion.

“People would much rather have free music and have less sound quality for the quantity of music able to gain access to, rather than the opposite,” Rios said. “For me, I believe people won’t give in to it because there may be no noticeable difference in sound quality, especially since there are many other ways to access music on free platforms.”

Jay-Z hosted a meeting in Los Angeles last month to discuss his new service. In attendance were Kanye West, Rihanna, Madonna, Coldplay’s Chris Martin, Jack White, Daft Punk, Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé, among others.

At the meeting the artists discussed methods to gain profit from distributing their own work and concentrated on topics such as videos, artists’ rights, and how music has been damaged by massive commercialism.

What Tidal lacks is the amount of preference that free music apps, websites and services already provide: original content.

Sac State KSSU DJ Josue Alvarez Mapp explained how the popular artists backing Tidal do not convince people such as himself about the cause.

“These artists such as Kanye West or Deadmau5 are popular and have talents in their own right, but lack the creativity they once had when they first started, now their music is still huge but it is not revolutionary or groundbreaking like it was before,” said Mapp.

Mapp believes Tidal does not offer anything original and is unable to provide functions that audiences cannot already gain anywhere else.

Regardless of the abundant skepticism from the masses, only time will prove whether Tidal results into a success or becomes a million dollar failure.