Recently, Jay-Z released his new streaming service, Tidal, a business venture that was highly publicized and had investors like Madonna. Now, Apple Inc . will be implementing a streaming service, Beats Music. Just acquiring the service was not good enough for Apple, as they decided that the best way to swat the competition was to poach investors from the Tidal team to join Beats. First on the list of potential partners is none other than Taylor Swift.
As streaming goes, getting Taylor Swift on the bill is an accomplishment. Only last year, Swift removed her entire catalogue from Spotify due the poor percentages Spotify pays to artists. When asked to speak on her decision, the president of her record label explained Spotify’s poor partnership issues.
“They take, and they say, ‘We’re going to put it everywhere we want to put it, and we really don’t care about what you want to do. Give us everything that you have and we’re going to do what we want with it.’ And that doesn’t work for us. They just need to be a better partner.”
As of this week, Jay-Z’s Tidal is already close to beating Spotify after signing Taylor and having both Beyoncé and Rihanna debut songs on the service. Apple Inc.’s Beats Music plans to pursue a similar business strategy, according to Daily Mail .
Apple has previously approached artists like Florence + the Machine for partnerships, as well. Their plan is to offer special deals to artists for part ownership in order to stream their work on Beats Music for a better price. The trouble that Apple Inc. may run into is the fact that Tidal was created to ensure that artists have a rightful profit from streaming, a promise Beats Music has yet to formally make.
Some music business insiders believe that Jay-Z’s royalty payout will likely be in the same range as streaming services like Pandora and Spotify, but his roster will like make his profits larger. The founder and CEO of Jingle Punks, a music publishing company, Jared Gutstadt, recently commented about Tidal.
“ Pandora and Spotify do pay out a huge amount in royalties to record labels. But if you look at all the people standing on the stage the day of the Tidal announcement, they were the kings of the major labels. It’s not a question of whether it will be better for these artists but a question of scarcity. The likes of Jay-Z, Jack White and Beyonce have better content that’s available somewhere else, so people are going to pay for it.”
So far, Apple Inc. has refused to speak out about whether certain artists will be partners in the Beats Music relaunch.
[Image via BeatsMusic.com]