Tidal Now at 3 Million Subscribers

Good news regarding Tidal.

Cheers, Greg

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If they would lower their prices they would be 6 million.

Some time ago I saw a survey that said 75% of music industry executives expected Tidal to fail. It gave me hope to see a group with such a bad record of predicting trends in the industry say that.

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The whole point of TIDAL prices is to build a sustainable platform where artists actually get a reasonable royalty for their work.

That’s true, and personally I support them and hope artists get paid from it.

But I think Dimitris has a point. There are only 1.35 million subscribers to the premium ‘hifi’ service according to that article, and the service price to profit ratio (and therefore earnings to Tidal and artists) isn’t such a straightforward one in my mind. I do think their pricing is considered ‘high’ by many (probably largely the youngsters - aka a massive audience). So that in turn could mean that the uptake is a lot less, with people sticking to ‘free’ services.

How the music industry gets out of this mess (they’ve largely created), I’m not sure. 1.35 million premium subscribers worldwide isn’t going to do it I don’t think.

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I don’t quite understand the pricing discussion here. They offer their service at the same price as everyone else. It’s $10 for lower quality stream.

Cheers, Greg

Well….

Tidal now have 3 million subscribers, apparently only 1.35 million of who subscribe to the premium ‘hifi’ service. Would they have more if it were cheaper, and would they and/or the artists make more money if that were the case? Or are there just only so many people who will pay for something?

In the UK Tidal hifi is £20/month. £10/month for lower quality. So I guess relatively a fair bit more expensive than the states. I think other countries suffer the same but don’t know for sure. £20/month is OK for me, but expensive for others (as in many walks of life I’m sure). But at a certain point I imagine people will just ‘suffer’ the free services even if they dont like the quality, and then none makes any money - in fact the provider probably loses money, the artists definitely do.

Interesting discussion I think.

The furore caused by the cost of streaming music - hifi quality or 320kbs - when you are talking about services carrying libraries of millions of tracks always amuses me.

How many people out there are paying twice and thrice that for a TV service carrying soaps, shopping channels and re-runs of old films.

You don’t have to be a music junkie or an audiophile to see the disparity in value between shipping music into your home and buying cable TV.

In the UK alone, you’re paying more than the base tidal subscription for the privilege of the licence fee to watch Eastenders on the BBC.

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I agree. It’s got be be the best deal around.

Cheers, Greg

Turns out that the new owners are suing the old owners for overstating the sub count at sale.

I was so close to quitting Tidal then. The streaming quality was awful. But the catalog looked so tempting that I kept the faith… …Glad I did.

Tidal has changed everything about how I consume music. Used to buy 3-4 albums per week. Have purchased six in the last ten months.

Well, we get a fair bit more than that from the BBC :wink: (for those of us that wouldn’t dream of watching East Enders)

Like local and national TV, news, radio, web, drama, documentary, film, to name a few, and importantly - for now at least - independent of government and corporate influence. At least far more than many other ‘agenda’ based services around the world.

But I don’t think the real issue is Tidal being too expensive (relative to the BBC or otherwise), its that music has been devalued by all the services that give it away for free - therefore anything can be deemed ‘expensive’. How they claw things back from there I’m not sure.

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Not sure if this is proprietary or not, but how many Roon Subscribers are there to date? This is a great program for sure.

Edit: 3 million for Tidal , +1 (just signed up)

It’s unlikely that they would divulge that information. I don’t think there’s any advantage for them to do so. However, the increase activity in these forums tells me that their membership must have increased significantly over the past few months.

Glad you joined Tidal. I feel it’s an important component of the Roon system.

Cheers, Greg

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More activity and more members is a good thing. Once the word gets out, I could see Roon/Tidal combination squeezing out other services. I dumped the paid Pandora and Slacker, since Tidal (and Deezer) meet my streaming needs.

Cheers, Robert

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