What is Tidal?

April 28

	Last month some of the biggest names in music joined Jay Z for the launch of his premium music streaming service Tidal. Here are some facts about it. Tidal is membership-based streaming service, similar to Spotify, which offers music and exclusive video content. Tidal currently has more than 25 million songs and 75,000 music videos in its library. Users can pay either $9.95 a month for a standard streaming service or $19.99 for high quality streaming in the US. The same tiers cost £9.99 and £19.99 in the UK. Tidal originally started in Scandinavia in 2009. Today it is under new ownership, and those owners are musicians. Not just Jay Z, but Arcade Fire, Beyoncé, Calvin Harris, Coldplay, Daft Punk, Deadmau5, Jack White, Jason Aldean, J Cole, Kanye West, Madonna, Nicki Minaj, Rihanna and Usher. Unlike rival Spotify, the service doesn't have a free tier - meaning the musicians stand to make more money from it, but this also means it doesn't play ads. Tidal has introduced a feature aimed at promoting emerging artists. Tidal Rising is part of an update to the service’s web and mobile app, and currently lists Drenge, Stealing Sheep, Juce, Chastity Belt, Young Fathers and Marika Hackman among its featured artists. “Every week, nascent talent in any genre will emerge,” Tidal said of its new function. This new element should also quash the criticism that Tidal will not appeal to smaller artists. The bit rate, a measure of quality, at Tidal is an incredible 1,411 kilobytes per second - much above the 320 for subscribers of Spotify. Instead of serving up compressed files, Tidal streams lossless FLAC files. This means the serious audiophiles among us can now enjoy streamed music at exceptional sound quality and fully-detailed, richer sound. We are proud to announce that we now offer FLAC as an option for ISRC embedding. Find out more about this service here: https://www.isrc.com/embed_ISRC.html. Sources: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/apr/17/tidal-music-streaming-launches-tidal-rising-emerging-artists http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3050209/Is-Jay-Z-s-Tidal-FLOP-App-s-ranking-plummets-month-launch.html