The Numbers On Jay Z’s $56 Million TIDAL Purchase
In yet another power move, Jay Z put in a successful bid to purchase the streaming music service TIDAL. Add that to Armand de Brignac and all of his other holdings if you can still keep track of them.
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Aside from what is generally assumed to be a Spotify competitor, what exactly did Jay purchase? We checked out the numbers on Jay Z’s $56 million TIDAL purchase, and here are 12 fast facts about Hov’s new potential cash cow.
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photo: WENN
$56.2 million
Even if he really was cracking Def Jam until he was the $100 million man, Jay paid a pretty penny for TIDAL. He reportedly put in a $56.2 million bid for the streaming service.
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95.18
Unlike some of Jigga Man’s other vanity deals, he pretty much owns the company. That $56.2 million bid means Jay Z owns an overwhelming majority stake in the company with 95.18 percent of Aspiro’s shares.
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19.99
None of that free mode with logging in through Facebook stuff. Shawn Corey Carter is aiming at your pockets with a $19.99 monthly subscriber fee. You can preview the service freely for seven days, but after that, it’s time to pay.
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1400
That would be 1400 kilobits per second. TIDAL advertised a truly lossless format, and by comparison it should be. The average iTunes mp3 is 256 kilobits per second. Whether you’ll actually notice all that extra musical data when you’re listening depends on a lot of different factors.
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34
Before ‘Hov shelled out all that guap, TIDAL already had international agreements with 34 audio brands including Anthem, Airable by Tune In Media, Astell & Kern, Audeze, and more.
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75
As of October 28 2014, TIDAL CEO Andy Chen told TechGen magazine TIDAL pays out approximately 75% of their revenues to labels and rights holders organization. No word on what that means for artists on a per stream payout, but it’s telling that someone like Taylor Swift is down with TIDAL but not with Spotify.
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25 million
TIDAL was sitting on 25 million tracks back in October of 2014.
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75,000
Don’t gloss over the fact TIDAL also bought Wimp. That move means TIDAL has 75,000 music videos at its disposal if it chooses to make them available to customers.
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512,000
Purchasing Wimp also meant TIDAL got access to the company’s 512,000 paying subscribers right out of the gate.
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3
Unlike your trusty phone or iPod there’s a limit on the number of devices you can use. You can use one device in online mode and up to three devices in offline mode simultaneously.
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31
If you’re on the move, TIDAL is available in 31 different countries. Given how ‘Hov and Queen Bey travel, it’s likely that number will be quickly growing.
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1
The highly touted HiFi web playback that allows you to enjoy those 1400 kbps bitrates is only available on one browser, Google Chrome. So if you want to stream audio on your laptop from another browser, it might sound just as crappy as a run of the mill YouTube video.
