When Neil Young asked us to switch to Tidal, I went along and loved that it paid the artists 10x more per stream.
But Tidal is American owned, spotify isn’t…
I’m struggling on this one, a lot of the lil punk bands I love could really use the revenue but, y’know, trade war etc.
Anyone have any thoughts to assuage a guilty conscience on this one?
So Tidal pays royalties at about 4x the rate of Spotify, not 10. That is still only US$ 0.013 per stream, compared to spotifys US$ 0.003.
However that is not the whole picture - the big 3 music companies (All American) control the market and get the lions share of revenues from all platforms. They actually get more of the pot and all the other labels and independent get less.
So the choice between Tidal and Spotify for artists is not as significant as you think.
Meanwhile Tidal has been bought by an American conglomerate owned by Jack Dorsey (the founder of Twitter), a lot of staff have been laid off (Dorsey laid of a large number of staff in 2024 and said the company needs to be “more like a statrup”), and they removed the subscription direct-share with artists in 2022. It is very likely artists will be squeezed more and more to save money.
Tidal is just another tech-bro owned company. Even if we park all the Trump/Canada stuff for a moment there are plenty of reasons to dump it. At least Spotify is a publicly listed independent European company for all it’s many flaws. The rest of the market is sewn up by American tech companies: Apple Music, Amazon Music, Google YouTube Music.
Maybe your money is better spent outside the big US tech companies.
Interesting, thanks!
I thought it was ten times but on reflection that was probably some exaggeration by some artists outside a punk show who somehow got really stoked upon learning my buddy and I had tidal etc.
Anyway, thanks for the detailed response!