TIDAL's artist-led ownership is perhaps one of the defining aspects of the enterprise, which will seek to put control of musicians work back in their own hands. In an interview with The New York Times, Jay Z says current streaming "pay system[s] [are] unfair to artists. Everywhere else, everyone gets compensated for their work. Music is everywhere—you consume it every day, everywhere you go. The content creator should be compensated. It's only fair."
There will be no free tier. It will offer music and videos.
The company's co-owners and majority investors: high-profile artists such as Win Butler and Régine Chassagne of Arcade Fire, Daft Punk, Jack White, Kanye West, Beyoncé, Madonna, Usher, Coldplay's Chris Martin, Alicia Keys, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj… so yeah… some heavy hitters.
So it's basically a stream service you have to pay for and the owners are musicians?
Yeah, I think the idea is to provide a greater revenue stream directly to artists. The whole Taylor Swift thing this past year where she yanked her stuff from streaming services.. yeah well she was just dumb… in reality they were paying the labels, the labels were just, and always have, shafted the artists.
Well they can't be getting shafted too much from the labels considering all those artist are multimillionaires. I wonder if new artist that want to get their music played on this service will have to pay a fee?
Artists are lucky to make 7% of the profits from streaming music: http://www.techhive.com/article/2881115/record-labels-reap-45-percent-of-royalties-from-streaming-services-study-finds-artists-lucky-to-poc.html
A 2010 report suggests that for every $1,000 sold, the average musician gets $23.40. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100712/23482610186.shtml
Those are definitely some horrible percentages. The labels are screwing the artist in the sense that they are taking too much overall. There is a lot of people to pay on the way to making an album and marketing to get it to sell though. None of which offer their services for cheap.
Absolutely, the marketing of a major album is a big deal and costs a lot, as do tour coordination and whatnot. But check out Macklemore's Jimmy Lovin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJXuDGL5ooE He describes the process of wanting so bad to be on a label, and then how they actually treat them…. he of course went on to tell the labels to screw themselves and did it himself.
That seems to be the way to go now. My brother is a sound engineer and just got done recording and mixing an album for a screamo band and they're just promoting it on their Facebook page. It obviously harder to get exposure that way but people can still make a living playing music like that.