I guess it’s a way to corner some of the indie artist market, since it will only be available on Tidal. Unlike the current distribution model where you upload to one distributor and they propagate it to all streaming platforms. It might not be as enticing for people who want maximum exposure of their music though.

It could still get swamped by spammers uploading ads.

…It might not though. Spamming seems to be a bandwagon kind of activity, and this may simply not catch on, in lieu of more popular, lower hanging fruit.

Oh, and on this:

from the storage costs

Music storage is dirt cheap these days.

As a random example, the Gorillaz discography, as lossless ALAC, is apparently ~4 Gigabytes on my disk.

In one server like this:

That’s like the full discography of 350,000 artists.

Of course its a bit more complicated. For example, I suppose they gotta cache popular uploads, but still. The storage part is not hard for them to do as a rounding error in their budget.

The expensive part is coding the interface, backend software, sliding this into the streaming infrastructure they already have, and stuff like that.

Good. I have my own tracks I like sharing with friends