Talent in Charge?

5 Apr, 2015 By: Stephanie Prange

A group of top recording artists, led by rapper Jay Z, wants to make streaming pay talent more. They’ve launched a new music streaming service — Tidal — designed to offer artists better pay for their work.

The service starts at $10 monthly and is designed to take on the likes of Spotify and Pandora by offering better-quality audio and better remuneration for artists. Such luminaries as Beyonce, Kanye West and Madonna were on hand for the announcement.

This isn’t the first time a big-name music star has called out cheap (or free) streaming services for underpaying artists. Singer Taylor Swift, fresh off the launch of her blockbuster album 1989, pulled her catalog from subscription streaming service Spotify, saying artists and their labels aren’t paid enough for the many times listeners stream their songs on the free version of the service.

“Valuable things should be paid for. It’s my opinion that music should not be free, and my prediction is that individual artists and their labels will someday decide what an album’s price point is,” she wrote in a column in The Wall Street Journal.

It seems Tidal may be one step in that direction, as far as artists are concerned. Artist Alicia Keys, at the press conference in New York, said Tidal will “preserve the value of music,” according to the Los Angeles Times, and will offer exclusive content not found anywhere else. Sound familiar? Tidal has no free service; it’s $9.99 monthly for basic service, with standard streaming of music and high-definition music videos, and $19.99 monthly for CD-quality streaming, HD videos and access to original content.

But in the Internet realm, who really is in charge? Is it the content producers or the technology companies that deliver content? It’s a question that has not only plagued the music business, but also the entertainment business at large.

Will Tidal’s quality streaming, offering better compensation to talent, convince consumers to pay more (or, really, pay anything at all)? That’s an open question. I, for one, hope it will, and probably so do the many movie and TV show producers out there that find they don’t get enough of the bounty from the Internet revolution. But it’s not the top stars that are really in danger. It’s the upcoming talent that is taking the biggest long-term hit for low-cost streaming. I hope Tidal finds a way to include them, too.

Talent in Charge?

About the Author: Stephanie Prange