Sprint Takes 33% Stake in Jay Z's Tidal for $200M

cageymaru

cageymaru

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Reports of the demise of high end music streaming service Tidal have been greatly exaggerated it seems. In Jay Z's song, "U Don't Know" he boasts that he can sell water to a well. Today, he sold 33% of the company to Sprint for $200 million, thus giving the company an evaluation of $600 million. Jay-Z completed the purchase of the music service from Aspiro for $56 million in March of 2015. This deal will add 45 million Sprint customers to the service where artists such as Neil Young exclusively stream content. If net neutrality laws are relaxed, I wonder if they will get data cap friendly streams of the robust Tidal lossless Master recordings catalog as those downloads are extremely large in size. I suppose that Sprint didn't put much merit into the recent reports of Tidal wildly inflating subscriber numbers.

As part of the partnership, Sprint will make Tidal available to all of its 45 million customers, including pre-paid users, giving them full advantage of the many exclusives on the streaming site, which is one of the biggest selling points the platform has. In just over a year, Tidal has launched new albums from the likes of Rihanna, Kanye West and Beyoncé, as well as new songs, remixes, playlists, concerts and music videos from those artists and many others. The ability to watch or listen to these exclusives are limited to paying subscribers, as Tidal doesn't have a free tier.

Sprint's CEO will join Tidal’s board of directors, but Tidal says it will still be run by the many famous musicians who have helped bring so much attention to the company in the year-plus since it launched.
 
Does this mean that Sprint customers get access for free? If so, that's a huge win for Sprint customers. As for net neutrality, AFAIK, Sprint has actual unlimited plans. Pretty sure mine is (though I use wifi whenever possible, cuz it's faster).

Edit: it appears customers have to subscribe to the service, but allegedly there will be exclusive content for Sprint customers. Not sure how that helps Tidal. I'm certainly not likely to subscribe simply because I get a little extra exclusive content.
 
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This was the best case scenario for Tidal from the get-go. Well, a total take over would have been better, hippity hoppers and pop tarts don't have pockets deep enough to soak up the kind of losses an emerging technology can hand you. There's a reason Apple never innovates, there's no money in it.
 
That's a big WTF what were they thinking with the losses Tidal is taking.
 
Wrecked Em said:
I swear I thought Sprint went out of business years ago.
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Probably their landline or long-distance services.

But yeah, I have Sprint Mobile and I'm not signing up for some bs exclusive content on an already rather exclusive music service. If I was those artists, I'd be pissed.
 
Wrecked Em said:
I swear I thought Sprint went out of business years ago.
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Nope. In fact they have a lot of excess capacity which is currently rented out to 2nd & 3rd tier mobile phone providers like republic wireless. Probably one of the smartest things they did.
 
Wow fucking great. Glad to see my monthly cell phone payment is going to into a near death streaming service.
 
I love the sound quality of Tidal, their focus on everything but the music was extremely disappointing. I don't want to watch videos on my cell phone, or live concert events. I want curated playlists in all genres of music not just hip hop and dance, easy playlist construction, music discovery that suggests music based on what I like; Spotify and Apple get that right.

I just wish Apple brought back some of the features from Beats Audio like "The Sentence" where you gave it a place, a mood, who was with you, and a music genre and it provided an amazing playlist based on the parameters that went DEEEEEEEP into a music catalog.

Aside from over priced access and fantastic music quality, it fails on all other fronts. Maybe Softbank can broaden Tidal's appeal with the infusion of cash.
 
fadedlogic said:
I love the sound quality of Tidal, their focus on everything but the music was extremely disappointing. I don't want to watch videos on my cell phone, or live concert events. I want curated playlists in all genres of music not just hip hop and dance, easy playlist construction, music discovery that suggests music based on what I like; Spotify and Apple get that right.

I just wish Apple brought back some of the features from Beats Audio like "The Sentence" where you gave it a place, a mood, who was with you, and a music genre and it provided an amazing playlist based on the parameters that went DEEEEEEEP into a music catalog.

Aside from over priced access and fantastic music quality, it fails on all other fronts. Maybe Softbank can broaden Tidal's appeal with the infusion of cash.
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They have an extremely deep classical section. It's hidden by the worst search UI in the history of streaming services. No, I think Amazon game and software downloads is worse. If you KNOW what you want it's most likely there. I like curated playlists from others like Spotify has with their Reddit groups. Is there even a way to befriend someone and look at what they listen to on Tidal? That's what I find bewildering about Tidal. Music should be easy to find and shared as it's the sharing of pleasure that brings people together. They really need a social engineer to figure out how to get people together listening to Tidal.

Then there is the asinine "only one person can listen to an account at one time". If the stuff wasn't lossless I would dump them. Then again paid Spotify sounds terrible to me. Amazon rips are kinda fine, but I can tell the difference in Tidal and Amazon tracks pretty easily if in the mood to critically listen. Amazon can pass if I just turn it up and dance. Never tried Apple again after iTunes deleted my entire pirate music catalog a decade or more ago. Left a message that the music I had was unauthorized and deleted it. I think I had 2 or 3 iTunes tracks that someone had removed the DRM from so it deleted 4TB of music. That software will never get installed again even though I went legit in 2004.
 
I have a bridge to sell Sprint. (Well actually several thousand bridges to sell Sprint because our infrastructure is in such shit shape.)
 
I have Sprint and as long as they have unlimited plan, I shall support them. You guys complaining, enjoy your limited internet capacity!
 
"If net neutrality laws are relaxed," -- Is that the newspeak we're going to start using for eliminating essential consumer protections?
 
I don't think you can use the number of mvnos as a measurement of success. It merely means they're willing to oversell the network to anyone.
 
Tiburon1186 said:
I have Sprint and as long as they have unlimited plan, I shall support them. You guys complaining, enjoy your limited internet capacity!
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unlimited was great when I could get a signal, even if I could get a signal it was slow unless I was couple hundred feet from a tower. I wish they had better coverage, competition especially in cell phone service is great for the consumer.
 
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