from Hacker News

Apple in Exploratory Talks to Acquire Jay Z’s Tidal Music Service

by kloncks on 6/30/16, 10:25 PM with 60 comments

• by rloc on 6/30/16, 11:04 PM

  I remember when Gruber was telling us that Apple was not buying Beats for the streaming service and its associated contracts. The truth is Apple acquired Beats almost solely for this asset.

  This move makes totally sense if you consider that Apple is trying to control the streaming market the same way it controlled the download to own one. I'm sure the labels will do whatever they can to avoid it.

  Spotify is a (big) thorn in Hook's foot and Ek would die rather than sell Spotify.

  That also explains why Apple is not releasing the 30% tax for music streaming and why Spotify released an app with its own payment system to grab attention. It's war.

• by k-mcgrady on 6/30/16, 10:49 PM

  Makes sense if it's for the exclusive content opportunities. I remember seeing a report when Kanye made his new album a Tidal exclusive and the number of users they got from that deal alone was staggering. The problem is that a lot of those users will cancel after their free trial but if they keep coming back for exclusives they'll a) want to stick around b) have no free trial so will pay for a month anyway and might stick around. Tidal also obviously has rights to high quality audio files - maybe Apple doesn't have that and it's something they want to do once they bring out the iPhone with lightning headphones.

• by uptown on 6/30/16, 10:53 PM

  Acquisitions like this make no sense to me. At best you're getting access to the current popular artists under temporary licenses from a platform that's failed to gain a massive user base.

• by cocktailpeanuts on 6/30/16, 11:36 PM

  I knew this would happen from the beginning, but actually seeing it happen breaks my heart.

  I really can't interpret this as anything other than Jay-Z trying to be like Dr. Dre.

  The difference is Dr. Dre's company actually created a product people wanted, and he deserves the success.

  As for Tidal, how is this not different from union workers going on a strike? Except that people going on a strike do have legitimate reasons. For the "exclusive" artists who were on Tidal they're all rich people already. They just wanted to make more money.

  They created absolutely 0 value with this company, all they did was create a collective with enough critical mass to matter and monetized on it. And when I say "monetize", it's us the fans that they monetized. It's almost like a betrayal.

• by tuxracer on 6/30/16, 11:02 PM

  Unpopular music service to acquire even less popular music service. With those forces combined they will be unstoppable! /s

• by DKnoll on 6/30/16, 11:16 PM

  Fantastic, time for me to leave my music library behind for the umpteenth time and move to greener music platforms. You failed me Hovito, just as Grooveshark, Napster, iTunes and many others did before you.

• by heavymark on 6/30/16, 11:39 PM

  While the Beats acquisition made sense for their talent and get a little faster entry into music streaming, but buying Tidal doesn't make much sense at all. Tidal software and technology doesn't offer anything of value. Jay Z presumably would not want to work under Apple long term.

  Tidal has licenses with a lot of artists but those wouldn't transfer to Apple Music, they would have to renogitate with them. And the whole reason artists are choosing Tidal is because they dont want Apple Music and want to be with a company all about the artists. If Apple wants to be all about the artists, it doesn't need Tidal for that, it can simply update it's relevant policies.

  One could say the want to buy them to get rid of the competition but I don't see Tidal being much competition since while artists may launch with them most like Adele end up on all the services anyway.

  Or the most likely reason is this is simply a an unfounded rumor.

  Now buying Pandora to replace their Genius feature would be amazing, but Pandora works so well because the amount of music is so small in comparison and Apple right now is anti algorithms publicly and all about human curation, so doesn't look like a pandora acquisition will be coming anytime soon as much as we want it.

• by Mandatum on 7/1/16, 12:04 AM

  To me it seems anti-competitive to disallow streaming services to use their own payment model. I expect a lawsuit to come from this and within the next two years either Spotify will be Daenerys, Breaker of Chains or Erlich Bachman, Waster of Cash.

  It seems like Apple have created a monopoly within their own ecosystem. Whether their ecosystem is too big to be monopolised will be up to the lawyers as regulations are put in place. I expect American government to allow Apple to keep their monopoly as it'd be "unfair" to not let a company do what it likes with their own products.

  If however the government decided this was a monopoly and regulations to be put in place, I expect Apple to get around this by "opening up" their eco system by making customers resign all Apple support for their products if they decide to "break out". Which is fair enough.

• by niftich on 6/30/16, 11:01 PM

  Makes sense if Apple wants solidify being known as a destination for 'music'.

  Amazon has been making inroads in this market [1], while Spotify and Pandora (most of Pandora's listeners are not paid subscribers) are the other incumbents [2].

  [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?ie=UTF8... [2] https://www.statista.com/chart/3899/paid-subscribers-of-musi...

• by bedhead on 6/30/16, 11:45 PM

  My god, how can Apple be this bad at services that they need to acquire a garbage product like Tidal?? Tidal is junk, an elitist music streaming service that does more to screw over any artist not in the top 25 grossing than Spotify ever could. Jay-Z is a $%^$ing hack and for the first time I'm extremely disappointed with Apple's strategy assuming they do this deal.