PSA: If you were one of the allegedly 1.3 million people who signed up to Tidal to wrap your ears around Beyonce’s new record Lemonade, your free month trial is officially up. But before you frantically scurry to remove your credit card details, it’s time ask yourself – should you really unsubscribe?
Before Beyonce’s album dropped, I really hated Tidal. I couldn’t even express my deep-seated hatred for the company, I just absolutely refused to download it. Like many others it seemed, I had developed a staunch moral objection to it.
“And what moral objection is that?” my friend asked me. “An objection to paying artists properly?”
It’s a fair point. All that Tidal purports to sell is higher and fairer payment for quality music, it’s not exactly morally reprehensible.
I was not alone in my hatred. People groaned about the service for months and it took the music industry’s top drawcard to drag people kicking and screaming to the service – increasing their subscribers by almost 50% from Lemonade alone. Yet despite Queen Bey temporarily serenading Tidal’s critics into silence, the underlying hatred of Tidal remains.
So why the Tidal hate?
There are valid reasons to hate Tidal. The company is run by a conglomerate of the super rich campaigning for more money which is enough to leave a bad taste in anyone’s mouth. When they launched, Jay Z claimed Tidal would dish out the highest royalties for artists and yet before long, they were embroiled in a $5 million class action lawsuit for underpaying their artists. It may have since been rectified, but the bad taste lingered. Kanye, an obsessive ambassador of Tidal was even caught pirating music.
These are all valid points. But considering its rivals over at Spotify could barely buy an artist a decaf coffee from their streams, let alone financially support them, the obsessive determination to hate Tidal seems a little off considering the company is now supporting better payment for all artists and a healthier music industry. Yet people tracked down these failures and misgivings and clung onto their moral high ground for dear life to justify their hatred.
So let’s be real, why do you really hate Tidal?
You are a lazy bastard
We can debate the complex pros and cons of music ethics for days, but the basic fact of the matter is that much of the hatred can be attributed to our intense laziness and stinginess. Alongside Spotify, Apple Music and Pandora, Tidal represents yet another app to download and another subscription fee to shell out for roughly the same content. In the good old days of iTunes, virtually anything ever recorded was available on a single platform. Even the Beatles ended up jumping on the iTunes bandwagon. However with the current civil streaming wars, artists just can’t make up their mind where they want to secure their content. Taylor Swift is writing ransom letters, Kanye is flip flopping all over the place while Adele really just wants to keep spinning the CDs.
Consumers can’t keep up. Spotify was the first to the game and therefore most people are on that platform. We were promised endless music and now we’re being told we can’t have it all.
Laziness & cost can’t explain all of it
When Kanye withheld The Life Of Pablo and released a torrent of beautiful, nonsensical Tweets instead, people flocked back to illegally streaming on an unprecedented level. Over half a million people downloaded the album. Oh the sweet, juicy irony.
Yet at this stage very few people were using Tidal and the free trial was readily and quickly available for anyone who wanted to get their hands on the album. A couple of clicks and the free album was right there in high quality, on your computer or phone for an entire month. Somehow people still went for the antiquated and labour intensive mode of downloading the album (legally or illegally), even though there was a free and quick option screaming in their faces. Even Kendall Jenner, Kanye’s sister-in-law Kendall Jenner couldn’t bring herself to download the app.
Beyonce managed to buck this trend with her groundbreaking album Lemonade, but even so, people still went to iTunes and bought the damn thing when it was available free to them on Tidal. Many others continue to boycott the service entirely, refusing to download the app and instead waiting months for the exclusive albums to trickle through other services.
So laziness can’t fully account for it considering the easiest option has always been to simply download Tidal, even if only for a month. Yet this option has consistently been shunned.
So what is it about Tidal that so offends us? What is it that stops us from hitting that download button.
Buckle up friends, let’s go deeper.
Hostage style marketing
Tidal is employing what can only be described as a style of brutal hostage marketing. Either you give us your subscription or you can’t have Beyonce. As far as bargaining chips go, Beyonce is a pretty damn enticing one.
But this form of marketing isn’t unique to Tidal – in fact, it’s everywhere we look on the internet. It involves services withholding something exclusive of value from us until we give them what they want.
The problem is, our generation doesn’t *exactly* respond well to this form of marketing:
“Turn off your adblockers to view this website.”
*Immediately presses back*
“Download Presto to view this exclusive new season.”
Yeah nah I’ll be right thanks.
“Pay $1 for four months of New York Times content.”
Well that’s ridiculous I can’t afford that. *Buys $18 brunch*
As the generation born of the internet era, we have developed a seething hatred for this brand of marketing and have become battle hardened to these propositions. Our generation grew up with an internet burgeoning with free music and movies, overflowing with torrenting sites and endless news sites at the tip of our fingers. Paying for content in any shape or form was laughable. We were trained in the art of content hunting, slipping our way through blocked websites and dodging viruses to get our hands on whatever we desired.
However, now that creative industries have cottoned onto the fact that artists and producers of content actually need an income, times are changing for the casual internet user. We still carry that loathing for any site or service that makes us pay and we continue to try and navigate any means to avoid it, but it’s becoming more difficult. After years of free content, people are angry that they are being shut out and excluded from places we were once allowed to roam free. Illegal downloads may be still available, but the internet is becoming more regulated. Tidal’s hostage marketing reminds us all of annoying pop ups telling us to delete adblockers to view sites, it reminds us of paywalls on newspaper articles and services begging for us to sign up to access shows or movies.
Ultimately, the backlash against Tidal isn’t really about how much it costs or the convenience of downloading the app, it comes down to our lingering hatred of a regulated and constrained internet that we once called our own.
A greater content crisis
Tidal’s trauma speaks to a greater crisis rumbling in the online content world – namely, how the hell do you get people to pay for content?
With a generation of internet users with a staggeringly low tolerance for inconvenience (find me someone who updates their computer on the first asking and I’ll hand deliver you Beyonce’s new album) and a world of illegal piracy at their fingertips, services must be truly groundbreaking to gain subscribers.
To their credit, the film and music industries switched on, geared up and painstakingly adapted, dishing out Spotify and Netflix to change the game by providing low-cost and extremely convenient services. Suddenly, illegally streaming and downloading with its glitches, buffering and spontaneous Japanese subtitles proved too inconvenient and users flocked to the services.
We are wired to find the path of least resistance. Spotify and Netflix managed to tap into this and convince us to once again dish out dollars for content. But now the market is officially crowded, precisely because streaming services are supposed to exist in isolation. Picking between Spotify and Apple Music isn’t like picking between a couple of CDs at JB Hi-Fi, it’s like picking between the entire JB Hi-Fi store and Dick Smith – we expect that choice to offer everything we desire, or close to it. Once we’ve committed to one service, why would we bother with another – we aren’t bloody made of money. If something is missing *cough* Game of Thrones *cough* then we find another way and come back to our chosen service for the rest.
Which brings us back to Tidal. The only way it managed to drag people over was because it held the ultimate music demi-God Beyonce, providing something so exclusive, so tempting that people were forced to change services, if only for a month. It was forced to deploy her as the ultimate bait by holding her hostage until we sign up, the exact form of marketing the internet generation has learnt to hate. But what choice do they have? People sure as hell weren’t going to switch teams for any other reason.
For precisely this reason, we as consumers must continue to have an open mind. Spotify and Netflix aren’t perfect and will only improve with competition which will hopefully mean more money will trickle down to the struggling artists and filmmakers. But as it stands, we crucify any service that dare suggest we move our subscription elsewhere.
I’m not saying you should keep your Tidal subscription. Go ahead and delete it, I probably will. But at least be open to the idea of new services and new ways of accessing content. Somewhere along the line another service may come along that is better for both the artist and the consumer – and they probably won’t have a Beyonce to drag you over with. We owe it to these industries to encourage competition and scrutiny, otherwise we all suffer when nobody can afford to produce the entertaining content.
As for Tidal? Make up your own mind. Somehow I think Jay Z and Beyonce have more pressing issues to deal with anyway.
Why Our Generation Can’t Help Hating Tidal appeared first on The Vocal.