TIDAL’s parent group Aspiro lost about $28 million last year. The loss was discovered after examining the Swedish-based company’s financial accounts, Daily Mail reports.
Reports also show the streaming service bought by Jay Z‘s holding group, Project Panther Bidco, for $56 million in March 2015, has struggled to make payments as well. They currently are $480,000 behind in what they owe.
Since TIDAL’s highly criticised roll-out, the streaming service has encountered a good amount of not-so-favorable press including the botched release of Rihanna’s eighth studio album Anti and accusations of lying about their subscriber numbers. They’ve also had their share of lawsuits.
TIDAL reportedly has about 4.2 million subscribers currently and thanks to Beyonce’s Lemonade release, 1.2 million new customers signed up to help beef up those particular numbers.
Although the high-fidelity streaming services trails right behind Spotify and Apple Music, there have been talks of Apple Music lifting TIDAL off Jigga’s hands.
Kanye West even took to his Twitter to demand that Apple give Jay his money for the service and expressed his belief that the streaming wars are messing up the music game.
It would appear that the labels agree, at least for now. With the release of Frank Ocean’s Blond album, released exclusively through Apple Music, Universal Music Group suspended all exclusive releases with Apple Music, Spotify and TIDAL.
Request for comment from TIDAL wasn’t returned as of press time.
Lmao hov is finaly learning talking about it and doing it are 2 different things….now go run along to your billionaire buddies to take advantahe of you and fund your next “business venture” haha companies gonna make him go so broke he will have beyonce out in back alleys suckin his way outa debt in no time
Coming from someone with nooo money..
You sonofabitch I own a 800,000 dollar home, run 3 businesses in North Dakota, I busted my ass to to get where I am, I be eating and years from now I’ll still be eating! You don’t know how hard I worked to be SO SO damn successful, I have a beautiful amazing wife and tons of money don’t any of you EVER doubt me or else I will fly your ass out here and slap the shit out of you, I’m worth a ton of money and tough as hell!
Duterte…is that you plyr?
STFU
Shut the fuck up already you say this same shit all the time
So what? Stop reading it then mother fucker am i making you read it? And ill stop speaking my mind when some little cock sucker like you comes and trys to make me and ill give you a bullet or a fist to catch with your face
Oh yea dumb fuck you check my bank account this morning? Yea i got no money its why i own 2 businesses in construction and homebuilding 15 employees couple company trucks and numerous pieces of heavy equipment im sooooo broke 🙁
i need euthanasia!!!
I told people from the jump that the report was false. That Apple WAS NOT going to buy Tidal! What would be the benefit of Apple buying Tidal?
They ALL (Spotify, Apple, Napster, Tidal) license THE SAME CATALOG from the major labels. Yeah Tidal has Prince and a few exclusives but Prince’s catalog in this day and age is not enough to make a huge difference and exclusives appear on competing services within 2 weeks to a month.
Right now Tidal has about 4 million subscribers and Apple Music which came out the gate AFTER TIDAL has 15 million. Apple’s already winning and the way Tidal is hemmorging money… they won’t last much longer.
This is a deep pockets game and no one’s pockets are deeper than Apple. I’m positive Jay Z understood this when he purchased Tidal was hoping to generate enough buzz to get the subscriber numbers up and then flip it by selling it for a huge sum of money, like what happened with Beats Music… but the numbers aren’t where they need it to be to attract someone like Apple.
There’s still the possibitly that maybe a player like Samsung or someone else looking to enter this money losing field will aquire Tidal.
Either way, I’m going find/listen to my music the best way possible; free.
Spotify loss a 164 million last year and y’all ain’t say shit…
Spotify has 200x the amount of users and at least 100x the amount of paying subscribers of Tidal. When you have half billion in revenue and an exponentially growing subscribing base, investors will look the other way. In Tidal’s case they make millions, lose tens of millions and subscriber growth is made by giving away subscriptions.
Lol. Spotify has gone through multiple rounds of capital raising. It has not made a single dollar for itself in 8 years dude. This with the inflated number of subscribers you mentioned
Yeah and they can do that because they are by far the leader in the industry and their growth exceeds all other streaming services in multiples. You don’t need to make money to attract investors! You need to show growth and the potential for profit, which are things that Tidal can’t demonstrate at all. Don’t believe? Look at Amazon back in the day or Tesla now.
So are we talking about investors or losses… I hate when a person doesn’t know shit about shit but tries to act like they do
I hate when a commenter is critical of comment to make it appear that there was something wrong with that comment when that comment and the subject matter went straight above that commenter’s head.
Well if you’re losing money and metrics state you are not making progress against your competitors and they have multiple times the market share, more paying customers and more growth, its kind of hard to attract/raise money to keep your business solvent until it becomes profitable ie like Amazon or the current example of Telsa.
C’mon Spaz…. think about it. Tidal has has no investors. Just the owners, and have had a 10% growth year on year with a $30 mill loss for last year.
Spotify has been raising capital year in year out to the tune of 2billion and made a loss of $170 mill last year. (When they eventually start to profit, they will have to pay back investors first)
Tidal is in a better financial position. Please please please tell me you at least see this?
Have you thought about it? It doesn’t seem so. First off, Tidal has investors (crunchbase.com/organization/tidal/investors) and they have the part owners which are the artists on Tidal. The artists/owners on Tidal basically give their product(music, concerts) away for free to Tidal or exclusives(music) for X period of time. Therefore, for product they don’t have to raise as much money to buy royalties like other streaming services because they basically get their product for free or at a very discounted rate. All my original points still stand, Tidal does not have the subscriber base to justify its debt and there metrics suggest they will have a hard time attracting investors to keep them solvent, unlike Spotify. Did you read the article? they are not paying their bills, when was the last time you heard about Spotify, Pandora not paying their bills? You can’t keep going on as business if you have no money to cover your debts. So, have you really thought about it?
All streaming services made a loss (Tidal lost the least). But HHDX didn’t report that, did they? — Stop pushing hidden agendas HHDX
Well, when you have a thousandth of the number of users of other services, you shouldn’t be losing that kind of money.
The garbage they sell nowadays is not worth the $1, not even 50 cents. That’s why they sell it for a dollar. If it was good music they would sell it for much more. That’s why Roger Waters from Pink Floyd says Im not going to sell my songs for 1 dollar when me and my band worked for months on the record. Nowadays everybody is lost and confused.
GOOD! Fuck tidal and their exclusive ass shit… SPOTIFY ALL DAY ERR DAY