yeah it kinda seems like these artists saw an opportunity to make more money for themselves......which is what they are good at lets be honest, how much is Jay-Z worth these days???

Why let Spotify make the money when they themselves could be making it? Cant say i blame them!

Great point on the lossless RANN, like really, what percentage of people will notice a difference? marketing......

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quote:

Originally posted by evo8 how much is Jay-Z worth these days???

He's not worth shit. He might have money though.

Net worth of Jay-Z is estimated well over 500 million dollars.

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quote:

If less is more think about how much more more would be. -Frasier

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Originally posted by Robotrance That's bullshit. If you can't hear any difference between a CD and MP3 you probably have never been very interested or have the right set of ears, experience and hifi to begin with. I can listen to lossless 12 times longer without being tired than with the best MP3 which hardly anyone support though. You have to know how to compare. Time is the key word. Long listening sessions at loud levels. Impossible with MP3.

If actual paid professionals can't hear the difference on expensive studio rigs, how many people at home/on their portable devices are going to hear a difference?

How many streaming media listeners are going to give a shit about sound quality, honestly? They're going to listen with their iPhone earbuds anyway.

Offering pop music listeners high quality audio is like giving fine wine to rednecks.

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Originally posted by Mr.Mystery How many streaming media listeners are going to give a shit about sound quality, honestly? They're going to listen with their iPhone earbuds anyway. Offering pop music listeners high quality audio is like giving fine wine to rednecks.

Beats by Dre don't sell better because they are actually much higher quality, its mainly marketing. This is the same thing for most people.

I do prefer my music in FLAC or at least 320kbps MP3 format. 128 mp3 is noticeably worse than any either of them. I can't tell much of a difference between 320 MP3 and FLAC but FLAC is nice to have for encoding purposes.

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Originally posted by djnitride Beats by Dre don't sell better because they are actually much higher quality, its mainly marketing. This is the same thing for most people.

They could even go as far as not stream high quality audio at all and just say they do. How many could really tell?

I bet people are dying to hear rihanna in losless.

Great posts in this thread, especially from Palm and Storyteller.

My feeling is that Jay-Z saw the bank that Dr.Dre made and said "I want some of that too".

You need to understand that Beats getting bought by apple was not for the hardware, it was for the streaming service and user base.

And that's what Jay-z is trying to do - market it as higher quality (a perceived competitive advantage over other mainstream streaming sites) and as giving more to the Artists (again another perceived competitive advantage designed to appeal to people like me who hate spotify and youtube for their legitimized piracy platform).

As palm said, this is a exit deal; Jay-z wants to flip this for several hundred million dollars. And don't believe everything you read about his net worth - he's made some staggeringly bad investments over the years including three 8 figure property deals that went south and ended up loosing him a small fortune.

Sure, he's got millions but I know the developer of a house he was looking at here in LA that was priced at $120 and Jay-z just couldn't stretch to making an offer close to it (it ended up being bought by a billionaire computer game creator for $90m).

And I think that's what driving Jay-z to try to build this and flip it - he's not in the billionaire boys club yet and watching Dre do it must have really got to him.

It's a tough market; so much competition and Apple could crush him in a heartbeat if the decide to do so. Maybe he's hoping that apple will buy it too lol.

Here's more info on Jay-Z giving "more to artists":

http://popbitch.com/home/2015/03/31/scamming-the-tide/

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We were surprised to discover that Jay Z was quite so interested in ensuring that artists get paid a fair price for their work. He's certainly changed his tune a bit since Magna Carta Holy Grail came out. On that album (which you may remember as that one he sold to Samsung for $5 million – as part of a larger $20m deal) Jay took a piece by the 78 year old jazz composer, Bruno Spoerri, rapped all over it, and called the resulting track Versus. What’s ordinarily supposed to happen in this sort of situation is that the sampling artist would call up the original composer, ask for permission to use the music, acquire the rights (usually for a fee) and then release it once everything is cleared and above board. Not Jay Z though. No, he barged straight on ahead – without Bruno’s knowledge or his blessing. Then, to compound the issue, rather than discreetly gloss over this theft, Jay actually started claiming in interviews that he, Timbaland and Swizz Beats had composed the beat in the studio – even going so far as to explain the intricate (but entirely horseshit) origin story to Zane Lowe on Radio 1. Versus came out in 2013, but a legal settlement was only reached two weeks ago. The timing was rather neat – what with it all being finalised in the quiet shadow of all the Robin Thicke/Marvin Gaye headlines, and cleared just in time for this new crusade of his to ensure that hard-pressed musicians get fairly paid for their music.

And we learn that the combined net wealth of the 17 artists involved in TIDAL is $2,049,000,000. Yes, just over $2 billion.

The sad part is, it's not these artists who need a better deal. This is literally an extension of the now defunct Radio royalties deal that was in place until just a few years ago - basically the top artists (Phil Collins, Elton John, MJ, Celine Dion, etc) got the lions share of radio play royalites as they were the biggest artists.

Was such bullshit though as RDS (radio data tracking) was in place in Europe from the mid 80's and the USA since the early 90's, but still, Royalties were paid based on stature, not radio plays.

Same bullshit here, just on a different platform.

Last edited by DJ RANN on Apr-03-2015 at 19:16

So it looks like that Tidal is already a massive flop:

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Two weeks after Tidal briefly cracked the U.S. iPhone top 20 download chart, the app has crashed out of the top 700. Apparently American consumers have limited empathy towards Beyonce and Nicki. Soon after the launch fiasco, Tidal’s CEO was kicked out in a “streamlining” move. The new CEO Peter Tonstad, a former consultant for the Norwegian Ministry of Environment, has his work cut out for him. To make matters worse for Tidal, its main rivals are now surging. On April 20th, Pandora and Spotify occupied positions No. 3 and No. 4 on the U.S. iPhone revenue chart, respectively. This was the first time two music streaming services have hit the top 4 in sales simultaneously. In order to achieve the feat, Pandora and Spotify had to push Candy Crush Saga out of U.S. iPhone top 4 revenue chart, which is a remarkable achievement.

Full article here: (and it gets worse for JayZ)

http://bgr.com/2015/04/21/tidal-vs-pandora-vs-spotify/