Remember, Square has a stake in Eventbrite. They now have a stake in the full ecosystem of music artists: Streaming, performances, and soon merch, of course.
It's a side ecosystem just like restaurants (Square has had a stake in Doordash after selling Caviar to them). Today, Square for Restaurants also released in Canada.
As a SQ investor I'm not crazy about this play but I see the long term reasoning. I also think JAY-Z might help with Cash App although its booming on its own and very much has the rapper demographic already (there are no shortage of songs and albums named Cash App for a reason).
Curious why does square want a stake in the ecosystem of music artists?
Even eventbrite didn’t need square readers, people mostly buy their tickets in advance. Maybe it’s for event organizers to upsell at the event to attendees?
Maybe this is a play to demonstrate investment in black community, as someone else mentioned?
I think Square organizes around how people gather and transact, and focus on the under-banked. They have good data to inform where that happens, in what quantities, and when. Clearly food places, craft fairs, and music festivals have been crucial marketplaces for them, and now they are establishing themselves as a promotional platform to those markets. They now have a lot of surfaces to do so, and will probably always now be after more ad inventory.
They are positioned to own not only how people transact in person, but who will be doing those transactions, where, and when.
Imagine they roll out a data product to their merchants that shows an Uber Hot-Spots style dataset of sales, demand, and trends in both merchandise and the wild psychographics you can learn from a music service.
Ticketmaster has worked themselves into a bad position. There is a subset of people who hate them. If square could get the sort of after purchase fees that that Ticketmaster charges legislated so they have to be shown up front and named in non deceiving ways it would go a long way to weakening my Ticketmaster and LiveNation’s position.
I'm curious about that, because everyone I know that has had to pay the Ticketmaster tax hates them. Many artists are vocal about their hate as well.
I assume there's a reason venues continue to use them exclusively, which makes me think Ticketmaster's grasp on the industry is fragile enough that it'll break once there's enough momentum behind an alternative.
If you add up all the merch and ticket sales of the music industry (in non-covid times of course) it's quite a bit. 1% processing fees on that is a good revenue stream.
Thank you for clarifying this. I'm an investor in SQ also, and bought more yesterday. I saw this and now I'm kinda shaking my head wondering if they're spreading themselves too thin.
But having a "stake" in eventbrite, may not really be enough to justify paying this price for an also ran in the music streaming business. What makes Tidal worth anywhere near $300m?
Interesting! I wonder whether the outcome of this play will be more efficiencies and better pay for artists, or just Square taking a cut along with the record labels, managers, etc., leaving the artist out in the cold as usual.
That's just rap (and other pop music). I feel like a "product placement" vs a "product reference" is a key distinction. Rappers reference Cash App because of what it represents, not because they're being paid to endorse it.
Like when YG Nipsey dropped "FDT "it wasn't a campaign ad, and Smith and Wesson wasn't funding "Nickname" by Qadir. Way different from Coke paying to have a bottle on the table during Modern Family or whatever.
This article (currently) leaves out a detail mentioned by Jack in his tweetstorm about this [1]:
> [Jay-Z] will now help lead our entire company, including Seller and the Cash App, as soon as the deal closes.
Does this read as Jay-Z having an... operational role? I know Jack's leadership of Square and Twitter is fairly non-traditional but this was surprising to read.
Jay Z is a bit unique among mainstream rappers, his first album , Reasonable Doubt, was released independently. He's much more involved on the business side then your typical act taken for a ride by the label and left broke.
I guess it's odd for a music and branding mogul to take on an operational role at a payment processing company, in the same way it'd be odd if Patrick Collison started a label and dropped a rap album.
It's certainly striking, but the world is full of surprises like that. Goldman Sachs' CEO is an EDM DJ with 550,000 monthly Spotify listeners. He performs at nighclubs and music festivals, gets plays on Sirius XM, and his tracks chart on Billboard.
Have you heard his music? Almost everyone I've clubbed with, DJ'd with, learnt from, etc all universally say his music fucking sucks. I doubt people listen to him for the quality of his music, than wannabe IBankers looking for inspiration or something (and there was no shortage of analysts at GS who would listen to his shit for vibes or something).
It's a big world, so if you find the right platform for your best talent, you could become the next "surprise" too.
Odd but reminds me of Ryan Reynolds role at Mint Mobile. Marketing and operational roles merged. Basically when marketing is the crucial next step, your celebrity wants a big stake.
I'm not doubting his acumen, it's clear he's a great businessman.
I think the dissonance is that "leading an app" implies (to me) a more internally facing set of responsibilities than the kind of brand-building and collaboration I associate Jay with. Then again, maybe this is the strategic perspective that Jack believes these apps need.
Candidly, I'm also just chuckling at how some set of folks at Square are probably wondering to themselves "...is Jay-Z going to be my manager?"
Executive (which strangely means not executing) not operational, likely. Making deals, doing PR, celebrity stuff, picking winners of internal product pitches.
I think this makes tons of sense when you look at Cash App's distribution strategy. They have heavily focused on targeting the rap and music communities through influencer marketing.
> Square has run similar campaigns [referencing a seperate Burger King campaign] with rappers like Travis Scott and Lil B and other influencers, triggering a network effect for the Cash App. With 120,000 replies, Travis Scott’s tweet gained more momentum than Burger King’s. If only 129 of the 120,000 who commented on his tweet were new to Cash App, then Square’s cost of customer acquisition would have been less than the $925 per user that banks pay on average, according to our research, and 6,000 comments, only 5% of the total, would have dropped it to $20. Moreover, as the converted users appear to spread the word on social media, the Cash App can acquire additional users from just one.
I am thinking of moving to Tidal. The Spotify sound quality is awful for Classical music with their compression/processing unable to deal with complex passages. The Android app also upsamples everything to 48KHz and has occasional random audio glitches. Hopefully Tidal is better.
In case you missed it, there is an audio quality section in Spotify's Settings menu, and the default is "automatic", which might not be the highest. I'm not sure but I think the "very high" setting is 320kbps ogg, which I've never heard of anyone being able to discriminate from lossless in a blind test. Also, Spotify is coming out with lossless later this year.
(not affiliated with spotify and not very pleased with the service in general myself, just saying.)
I have it set to "Very High" and have their normalisation turned off. I can provide samples demonstrating distortion and break-up; the waveforms even look completely different visually. It's even audible over non-audiophile headphones. On my HD800S it's unlistenable. I have no idea what they are doing to the sound, but I have found many recordings that sound awful on both Android and Windows.
That sounds more like error on the label's/uploader's behalf? Most often that should be the same across platforms, including lossless. I've heard cd skips, vinyl crackle and tape warble on spotify so I know what you mean.
Then I'd think it's the "audio watermarking" some companies insist on using. Because for some rights holders, you're paying for their product but f-you nonetheless.
Sure, one example is the first minute opening of Osmo Vanska's Mahler 5. The big crescendo between 40-45 seconds sounds particularly bad, lots of break-up and distortion. Sounds fantastic on the CD.
The Spotify version sounds identical to the tidal "hifi" version (to me). I'm actually pretty curious now what this amazing CD version sounds like!
I'm currently on a Tidal free trial but I won't be moving from Spotify when it's up. I personally can't tell the difference. Maybe I'm half deaf but ignorence is bliss.
Very strange, I can confirm that your Spotify sample does sound much better than my one. Mine sounds identical on Windows and Android though, two very different platforms, so it may indeed be a UK problem. Thank you very much for the code.
while it doesn't help today, they are in fact looking to do that by Q3, from everything i've seen. I'm holding on to Spotify for now for ease of use, but I too want something better. I didn't like tidal when I used it years ago, though i'm sure they've changed quite a bit.
Spotify is pretty much bottom of the barrel if you're a music album fan, I think.
I find it's only good at playing random songs on giant playlists, or playing the radio. Managing a library of albums is a huge pain and I still don't understand how it's supposed to work.
Then there is the problem of questionable digital masters. There's 0 transparency into the mastering process and what Spotify uses. As you've observed, some things just sound really awful on Spotify.
If you really want the best, I suggest Roon + Tidal subscription for playback. Then use Qobuz/Bandcamp/etc. to purchase lossless FLACs to import into Roon, or rip CDs yourself. This will give you the best quality, and you can be certain the source quality is good. You can use Tidal lossless for streaming things you don't buy (but the selection is much more limited). The Roon UX is way, way better than Spotify for managing a large collection of albums.
Audirvana is another app which competes with Roon. Audirvana is a one-time fee of $100, versus Roon's subscription model (or, I think, ~$800 lifetime subscription, which is pretty up there).
I think the big thing both Roon and Audirvana achieve sub-optimally is just overall application performance and user experience. They do have a ton of features which help in managing massive audio libraries, far better than Spotify or Tidal alone. But, Roon legitimately feels like a browser app they threw in an iframe and nativefied. Audirvana is better IMO, but isn't as good as Roon at auto-discovering album artwork and metadata-ifying the connections between your local songs for hyperlinking and discovery.
The critical thing that I love about that methodology of music playback is the "synthesis" they both do of Tidal and your local music. There is a ton of music out there that's inaccessible on (all!) streaming services, and every audiophile I know eventually starts amassing a collection of lossless files from Bandcamp/etc. Neither a streaming service nor your local library alone is ever the "complete" view into all the music you want to enjoy; you need both, synthesized into one integrated view. Google Play Music used to be a decent solution to this, not the greatest quality but it solved this problem well, but then Google nerfed it into the ground.
There's still a lot of work to be done in this domain. To be honest, my go-to for local music playback is the same app I've been using for a decade after the fall of Winamp; Foobar (Windows). Its simple, ridiculously performant, infinitely customizable, and works great.
> You can use Tidal lossless for streaming things.
I have a Focal Clear, Schiit Lyr 3, Schiit Bifrost 2 and I can not tell the difference between Tidal and Apple Music. There are tests online which people regularly post on Head-Fi and Reddit which also shows that almost all people can't distinguish lossless from high quality lossy encodes.
> or rip CDs yourself. This will give you the best quality
No it won't.
As Apple describes in their guide for Apple Music they have, "dynamic range that’s superior to red book CD audio" because they transcode from the high-bit masters.
Master quality is king these days, when "transparent" compression codecs are used. However, there are still many people who believe they can hear/feel the difference. You will need a combination of a golden ear and extra good equipment, starting from about 1K and above for a headphone setup.
As much as dislike Spotify's UI, I listen to a mountain of fringe content that no other streaming service carries but Spotify has in spades, because all of the indies make sure to upload to Spotify.
I'm sorely tempted to build my own library/playlist management front-end on top of Spotify's API. They're the only streaming service I've found with an official streaming/remote control API, and with upcoming lossless support (albeit only CD-quality), their library with a tailor-made UI seems like the best trade-off I'm going to get in a music service.
Spotify doesn't "master", you upload an uncompressed version of the track, and they will encode to OGG with a target LUFS. Classical music isn't impacted by this; it's loud rock, pop and EDM with aggressive limiting where the volume gets turned down. When people complain about the sound quality, it's largely junk masters handed over to Spotify, not the encoding process. Granted, if you _really_ try to listen to artifacts, they are usually in transients.
Yeah I know how Spotify works. What I mean is the end user has no idea where the source comes from, how it was mastered or ripped, or what Spotify's criteria is for quality. It is opaque, and there have been examples of bad digital masters/rips used by Spotify. It seems all you can do is report bad tracks when you encounter them: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Social/Jitter-due-to-bad-CD.... The OP even gave examples of classical tracks which have audible problems.
None of this is an issue if you rip your own CDs or buy lossless from reputable sources in my experience. Spotify you're at the mercy of whatever crap Spotify has been given.
Thanks for the recommendations. I'm still very new to streaming and still buy CDs for most of my music. I am currently using UAPP on my phone and plug it straight into an RME ADI-2 DAC, the advantage being I don't have to fire up the PC. The disadvantage of course is storage on the phone.
Roon sounds like it would be great for you - but you'll have to spend some time and money on setting it up. I have all my music in lossless FLAC on a Synology NAS and run the Roon server on there. The Roon client should work on your phone and connect to your RME ADI-2 DAC as well (great DAC btw, I'd really like one myself). It handles lossless streaming, and ensuring the digital chain is optimized for quality all the way to your DAC. It can also apply arbitrary parametric EQ on the server side, in case you want to use some EQ profiles for your HD800s if you don't have the RME handy.
I’ve got a good set of speakers, and coupled with Tidal’s Master[1] quality recordings, there’s just no way I can go back to something of lower sound fidelity.
Because what people fail to understand is that from source -> listener there are multiple points at which information is lost. People obsess over the file format but not over which DAC they use or whether Apple, Spotify, Tidal has better encoding capabilities.
I moved to Tidal when Spotify decided to blow huge amounts of cash getting into the "exclusive podcast business" while still paying peanuts to most artists.
Tidal pays musicians something like 3x what spotify does. [0] This is probably still not enough, but at least it's the right direction.
After the end of google music, I switched to Tidal + Plex. It's great for library organization, custom dynamic playlists, and mixing personal files with streaming.
I have Plex lifetime sub and TIDAL sub, but never explored them in combination. Where would I start to learn more? Have you compared to Roon's or Audirvana's integration of TIDAL?
I haven't, but this thread got roon on my list to explore. I've used plex for movies for years, and google music's end got me looking for new things.
I have two music libraries: tidal and my own music (I'm using about 80% my own music). The music is well tagged already using picard, so I don't know how well that works out of the box. When I'm in the tidal library, I usually will mark an album/artist to be added to my normal music library and then it will start showing up there mixed in with my self hosted stuff.
The killer features (to me) are 1: playing by album instead of by track. I use the "random album" shuffle all the time and usually want to listen to an album all at once and 2: smart playlist builder which lets me make dynamic playlists around how many times I've played a thing, my personal rating, or when the last time I played it was.
If you're looking for classical music specifically, I would recommend a dedicated service. For instance, I use Idagio and I'm very happy with them (there are others of course).
The killer feature is curated metadata, dedicated to classical music: searching and browsing is infinitely superior. You can select a specific work and browse all its recordings. You can select a performer and view all their recordings. You can select a composer and filter their works by type, etc.
Thanks for the recommendation. I see that Qobuz also integrates with UAPP on Android (which gets around the 48Khz limit). Since I listen to mainly Jazz and Classical, it sounds like a good fit.
I can confirm Qobuz sounds great. I've signed up for a free trial. The integration with UAPP on Android works well and gets around the Android 48Khz limitation. Thanks for the recommendation.
My experience has been that TIDAL CD quality streams are of great quality, and some of the MQA ones are brilliant. Of course, a lot depends on the master quality, that seems to be the key these days as a lot of the sound compressionist's work has been automated by tools.
If you pay for it what are you getting an ad for? If you pay for Prime, you are getting access to a limited catalog of music. Unlimited subscription offers a full catalog of music and no ads.
I pay for Amazon Music, like I said in my other comment. I'm not talking about Amazon Music Prime. The app literally has full screen ads to upgrade the service to HD and so on. They are occasional, but they are ads. There's no option in the settings to disable them.
unfortunately, I don't think any of the streaming services offer the same level of control and confidence as something like foobar2000 with a local library. when I was originally shopping for a streaming service, I found it very frustrating to figure out all the technical details. they don't make this information at all easy to find, and even if they do, it's hard to trust that something weird doesn't happen under the hood on some devices.
my main use case for streaming is android auto, so I lowered my criteria to "no lossy-lossy reencode for bluetooth and works well with google assistant". so yt music was basically the only option for me. I would have tried amazon HD, but apparently google has deliberately made it hard to use with assistant, which hamstrings it for music in the car.
The underlying music for a large fraction of classical music is public domain now (but not all...classical music never stopped being composed).
But copyright can also cover the performance itself, not just the underlying music. So even though Beethoven's 9th symphony has long been public domain, for example, the Telarc recording of it by Christoph von Dohnanyi and the Celeveland Orchestra & Chorus is not. If you want to do something with that specific recording, you need permission.
Also, a particular arrangement might be copyrighted. Consider Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition". That was composed as a piano piece in 1874, and long ago became public domain.
Since then, numerous other composers have arranged it for orchestra, with the most well known arrangement probably being Maurice Ravel's in 1922. There have been dozens of other orchestrations including several this century, and also numerous arrangements for other types of groups and combinations of instruments and solo instruments.
A given recording will only be public domain if the underlying work, the arrangement, and the performance are all public domain.
Performance aside, plenty of classical works aren't out of copyright. My favourite composer, Herbert Howells, died in 1983; his works won't be out of copyright until 2053.
Can anybody explain how this makes sense for Square? Square + Tidal seems like a bizarre combination with neither benefiting in any significant way from being owned by the same company.
>Can anybody explain how this makes sense for Square?
I think the next frontier in fintech is getting in every payment rail imaginable. The music part isn't relevant, it's the payment of artists that Square is most likely interested in. Square wants to process your deposit right into your CashApp bank account and pay for your records with the CashApp card.
Jack and Jay-Z are pals. Jack is just another milquetoast SV CEO, but loves to surround himself with actual celebrities. This appears to be all but a sycophantic move to maintain his friend circle. It makes zero business sense.
In some places, you need to pay rights to play music in your store. As Square has a great number of business customers, it might be an easy upsell. Like get paid and provide a great ambiance?
Could also be a play to help reframe how people think of Square and be able to expand in other categories SMBs might need.
That's a great point I hadn't thought of. For example, small coffee shops play music on Spotify. IANAL, but I assume that's technically illegal, though no one will sue a tiny coffee shop over that. But once you start expanding to multiple shops, you may want to get more "legitimate". You already have Square, so now you can just add the Tidal service to your bill
The cost is less Tidal and more the Ascap and BMI licensing. It looks like there are companies who will bundle the cost of licensing into your monthly fee, though.
Some? Can you please tell me about where you legally/legitimately can perform recorded music in a public place for public consumption without "permission"?
I can't speak to the legality, but i've seen countless places (retail shops, restuarants, etc) where they were playing radio over the speakers. Also, i've seen playing over spotify.
As have I, and every one of those are breaking ASCAP/BMI licensing. A lot of stores subscribe to "in-store" networks, and that subscription covers these licensing fees. Using someone's iDevice with their Spotify/whatever app even if it is paid for is NOT a license for public performances. You (royal you) can disagree with it, but it is what it is. If it is usually the smaller places that feel the proper licensing is too expensive, but will be floored when they get popped.
Pure speculation, but I think there might be a play for Square to get into the concert merchandise business. The merch booth at shows always has vinyl and CDs for sale. Most people no longer have the latter and vinyl is a much smaller market compared to streaming.
I think a merchandise vendor who could provide exclusive releases to attendees in addition to handling payment processing might be very attractive to artists.
Why does a search engine have a music company? Why does a premium hardware company and OS company have a music company?
Why does a retail store have a music company?
It's conglomeracy and the theory of the firm. Mergers are efficient.
TIDAL isn't getting traction & Jay-Z wants to sell it <=> Square needs a hook into the rap industry because they market really well there. Square has been paying rappers to promote Cashapp since 2018.
Here’s Square CEO Jack Dorsey at a 2019 investor conference via Wall Street Journal:
“This is also something we weren’t expecting, but I think Cash App has touched in the culture. We’ve just benefited from people loving it and wanting to sing about it, and putting it in their music videos, and it’s amazing how much that spreads.”
The former American national soccer team manager, Bruce Arena, once was famously quoted describing a scrappy player, Clint Dempsey, with the phrase, “He tried shit.” Meaning - it was sometimes weird, didn’t always work, but he went for it and took risks.
You can think what you want about this deal, but Dorsey is similar. It reminds me of Amazon in a lot of ways. They will absolutely try anything, no matter how weird. Some start-up delivers tacos by drones? The next week Amazon has a whole new AWS managed service to deliver tacos by drones, and shuts it down the next year.
If there is any business out there right now that has some potential to be the Amazon of consumer finance, it is Cash App. Obviously the chances any business could do that are low. It’s by no means a clear path to success, but you at least have to admire Square for trying weird shit and being willing to do anything to see what works.
I generally agree, and the question I have for Jack’s leadership is, does he like to win or does he hate losing? If it’s the latter, he’ll have the follow through to make these risks pay off.
Not sure why NYTimes said this was undisclosed. This would give revenues of approximately $240M a year generously assuming everyone is on the HiFi plan.
I haven’t been able to find more recent subscription numbers. Was Sprint able to push Tidal to their customer base?
Now Square just has to also purchase Bandcamp and offer to directly include your purchases (for music that isn't in the streaming service's library already) to your Tidal library after buying it on Bandcamp. And then fill the void left by the shutdown of Google Play Music and YouTube Music's sub-par "upload your own music"-feature.
Wouldn't it be interesting if you had a free streaming service but you had to down a program that mined crypto on your machine?
It might also be a brave-like service where you can either buy Dorsey dollaroos (what I assume the logical name for a new crypto by square would be) or click on ads, then use the dollaroos to buy streams.
Perhaps great irony, in the "Other Tweets" section below Jack's tweets I see this one from Paul Graham - "When startups are doing well, their investor updates are short and full of numbers. When they're not, their updates are long and mostly words."
I fear there is a consolidation coming up for the music streaming services. Smaller companies like TIDAL will find it difficult to compete with Apple, Spotify, Amazon and Google.
As an avid TIDAL user I wish them well in their new "home".
Honest question, how is Jack Dorsey (and Elon Musk) able to be a CEO of two different companies? His time and capabilities are halved, while the stress and responsibilities are doubled.
How does the board approve of something like that even?
No one cares as long as the money is rolling in. Dorsey and Musk have enough star power to get shit done, raise significant cash and attract talent. So the board supposedly just shrugs at the half-assed CEO situation.
That is human nature. No one cares until the crisis is knocking at the door.
Also I chuckle at the people who think Twitter and Tesla CEOs are "similar". They are not. Musk will still be here in 10 years rolling and controlling. I'm not so sure about Jack.
When a company reaches a certain size, the CEO is basically a ceremonial position. Note how Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos all left their companies with little effect.
On square he has a competent staff to do majority of the load while he can be the visionary. It maybe coming around with Twitter after seeing them now iterate with the flurry of upcoming features.
This is a bizarre, seems like there is a personal issue here and perhaps the board should have a look at this? This is one of the areas that CEOs seem to have a lot of opportunity for odd behaviour, what with Benioff spending billions of his companies money on companies that he has invested in etc..
hate that this makes Jay-Z look like some kind of genius business guy to market people because he got an exit, when Tidal was an 'also-ran' as someone else said, and like never had any impact/users from the start
no idea how it held on this long, even in the beginning seemed like ridiculous thing to start up and chance of artists flocking to it or it become dominant against apple and spotify etc was next to zero
Strange comment. Should people not start a business because competitors exist?
Not to mention this is hardly Jay-Z's first exit. He sold his clothing brand Rocawear sometime in the 2000s and as the article says, he sold a luxury booze brand as well.
regularly see comments "who tf uses Tidal" "never heard anyone ever say they use Tidal"
When it launched it was marked "DOA" and everyone said we didn't need another streaming service (even if Spotify was yet to really take off, but did eventually)
A few ppl use it for FLAC quality streams and under some impression the service pays artists more because the launch board was all top gross artists on a stage. But within a few years all these reports came out about falsified stream numbers / inaccurate etc for Beyonce and Kayne releases.
It's a side ecosystem just like restaurants (Square has had a stake in Doordash after selling Caviar to them). Today, Square for Restaurants also released in Canada.
As a SQ investor I'm not crazy about this play but I see the long term reasoning. I also think JAY-Z might help with Cash App although its booming on its own and very much has the rapper demographic already (there are no shortage of songs and albums named Cash App for a reason).