Jay Z’s newly acquired streaming service TIDAL has fully merged with the Norwegian music platform WiMP, both of which he purchased for $56.2 million in his acquisition of the Swedish company Aspiro earlier this month.
TIDAL consolidates the services and offers subscribers a high-quality alternative to competitors like Spotify and Beats Music. According to Billboard, TIDAL streams content “at more than four times the bit rate” of other services and boasts a library of around 25 million songs. (By contrast, Spotify released a report in late 2013 noting that 80 percent of its library of 20 million songs had been streamed at least once.) Despite the infrastructure, Jay Z’s hope of making a significant mark in the streaming business will be an uphill battle as WiMP currently only has some 512,000 paying subscribers, a number that pales in comparison to Spotify’s reports of 10 million paying users last year.
While the higher-quality streaming comes at a premium price, TIDAL also carries 75,000 music videos in its catalog, all of which will be streamable via apps on iOS and Android devices as well as a web player. In addition to the media content, TIDAL also curates an editorial section that seems to be a likely new home for Jay Z’s own site Life And Times. Noticeably, the Life And Times website currently redirects to TIDAL’s countdown-to-launch site.
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