How To Cope If Tidal Does Go Under?

[PeterG]

I hope they do go under.  The music streaming businesses (Tidal, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon, etc) have used the low cost of capital created by internet euphoria to deliver music at prices which are too low to sustain their businesses, and they have used their market power to drive down the price people are willing to pay for music in general.  It's been rational for many of them to do so because they are rewarded with huge stock prices and/or internet traffic that generates profit in other ways, such as Amazon Prime Memberships or Google ads.

 

The problem with all of this is that it sucks the profit out of the music industry in the same way that the internet sucked the profit out of the newspaper industry, bookstores, etc....

 

So what to do?  Make a list of the stuff you're enjoying on Tidal, and then buy the CDs from Amazon or downloads from HD Tracks.  Basically, pay an actual market-based price for the music you enjoy

[PeterG]

20 minutes ago, jriver said:

No service like Tidal or even Spotify has ever been consistently profitable.  I think the reason is that the record labels have never offered enough margin. 

 

I'm not saying the label guys are the salt of the earth, but you have a funny way of thinking about who's "offering margin".  With Spotify's free service, there is zero margin, and that's on Spotify.  But even with the paid service, for less per month than we used to pay for a single CD, you can have the world's largest record collection.  Once again, Spotify and the others have set these prices, not the labels.  True the labels have demanded a healthy percentage of the fee, but it is WAY less than they were getting when the primary distribution was CD and/or vinyl sales.  As the Silicon Valley guys happily boast, they have disrupted the music business.

[PeterG]

7 hours ago, TubeLover said:

I buy at least 6-8 cd's a month based on what I hear on Tidal. In other circumstances, when listening to Tidal, I might choose to hear the entire catalog from, say, Van Morrison, or all the live releases from someone else. No one owns everything and all they might want to hear.  I have over 3,500 cd's that I've bought and paid for, not a single copy. 

 

To replace the total music I listen to on Tidal would cost me a fortune. Apparently you are wealthy enough to do so, to make such pronouncements. I suspect few of the rest of us are. 

 

JC

 

Actually--our practices are virtually identical.  I buy 4-6 CDs/month, typically from Amazon, often after listening to clips on Amazon or YouTube off of my laptop if I do not know the artist.  

 

Sadly, we're both out of step with common practice, very few people buy any music at all.

 

Cheers

 

P

[PeterG]

52 minutes ago, Brinkman Ship said:

Yes, but that is just who I know..I cannot imagine the majority of Roon users paid $500 just for Tidal integration. Maybe I am wrong.

 

Just my experience, which does not include the networking value. I am a non-Tidal user who signed up for the Roon trial.  Tidal makes the music discovery function vastly more powerful than a local library. I fully expected to spend $500 on a lifetime membership, but when I realized that I would also have to buy Tidal, which I didn’t really want,  I dropped the whole idea. 

 

Just as as a thought experiment which I am not sure is possible— sign off of Todal, and then try to do music discovery. I think you’ll be disappointed