Remember Tidal, the music streaming service launched by Jay-Z along with a bevy of other high-profile artists about half a year back? It is okay if you do not, because it is not very good, to put it politely.
According to its backers, what Tidal offers is a way to put more power and freedom to artists while offering better audio quality to its users. But, despite the presence of such talent and the promise of exclusives, music lovers have been slow to warm up to the service, and Tidal seems to be going the way of Neil Young’s Pono. Remember that one either? No, you don’t.
Now, Tidal seems to be going back to the old school ways, as well as morphing into an e-commerce site as it has now started selling physical music formats, i.e. CDs. Prince is selling his new album, HITNRUN PHASE ONE, on Tidal, both in physical format copies and through downloads on the site. It must have dawned on Prince that his exclusive deal with Jay Z’s Tidal service meant no one was hearing his work. Tidal mentions that this is the first time non-subscribers have had access to the service’s music.
Moreover, on iTunes the release date for HITNRUN PHASE ONE is today, September 14th. So now Prince’s album is available for digital download there as well. An actual physical CD is listed on Amazon as of tomorrow– and it’s on Jay Z’s Roc Nation through Universal Music, the rival of Warner Bros., which has Prince’s catalog and has his two CDs from last year.
This might have been a non-negotiable point from Prince though, a well-known Luddite who previously declared that “the internet’s completely over”. The musician last week also criticized the state of music. “I’m not interested in what happened yesterday,” he told the New York Post when they brought up how his music is still inspiring acts like The Weeknd, Miguel and Tame Impala.
“There might be music that sounds like me, but what good is that? You’re essentially in the feedback loop.”
“It’s a bad time for music in general. There’s not a lot of pop music in the mainstream that makes you feel scared, that makes you wonder what’s happening.”
There’s no word from Tidal yet on if they’ll be allowing other artists to sell CDs and downloads in the future, however seeing as how the service focuses on streaming, it seems unlikely. But hey, this is Prince we are talking about.
