David Hanak The market for music streaming services has been quite active in recent weeks. It's been a few days since Spotify made a major announcement changes for non-paying users and she boasted shortly before surpassing the goal of 75 million paying customers. Apple Music is also growing, and Tim Cook himself said two days ago that the service has over 50 million users. Now there have been some news from other competitors as well, such as Tidal and Google, which is preparing to launch an (old) new platform that could also mix things up a bit with the market.
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Patrik Siwek The Tidal service is aimed at demanding listeners, mainly because of the possibility of streaming in a significantly higher quality than offered by competing platforms. However, in recent months, information has been growing that the company is running out of money and that the service as such is in trouble. Now, reports have hit the web that the company has not been paying artists for months and is artificially inflating its customer numbers to make it look less bad.
The company is said to owe royalties for the past several months to three major labels, namely Sony, Warner Music and Universal. Some distributors belonging to these major labels claim that they have not been paid since the end of last year and are logically preparing to leave. Other journalists have come forward with evidence that Tidal is fiddling with the total number of plays for some exclusive albums to attract new customers to the service. The evidence of this conduct is quite convincing and is based on more than a year of investigation. Coupled with reports that the company is slowly running out of cash, it looks like the long-speculated end is indeed nearing. The power of competition is relentless in this market.
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In slightly more positive news comes Google, which is gearing up to relaunch its own service for streaming music (and video) content. It will be called YouTube Music and is intended to be a direct competitor to already established services. YouTube Music will have its own mobile and desktop app with more than a thousand different playlists and a huge music library. There will also be official music videos, special and custom radio stations and much more. The launch is scheduled for May 22.
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The service will be available either in free mode, when listening will be accompanied by the presence of advertisements (similar to Spotify Free). Likewise, a paid version (10 USD/€ per month) will also be available, in which there will be no ads, on the contrary, there will be the possibility of offline listening and other goodies. For paying Google Play Music users, their subscription will also transfer to YouTube Music.
Another change concerns the YouTube Red service, which is being renamed YouTube Premium and will also offer some news. Whether it's blocking ads, the ability to watch videos offline or in the background, access to "YouTube Originals" series and shared subscriptions to YouTube Music. The price of the subscription is 12 USD/€ per month, which is quite a bargain considering the combination of YouTube Premium with YouTube Music. The YouTube Music service will gradually become available in most countries, but the Czech Republic/SR is not in the first wave. However, this should gradually change in the coming weeks.
Source: Appleinsider, iphonehacks
Exclusives are the worst thing that can happen to music services, if I'm already paying, I want everything and I'll have one album on spotify, another on apple music and best of on tidal!
It depends on the specific singer or company ;-). Anyway, I'll just wait a month, that's fine.