UPDATE: A representative of TIDAL has issued a statement to AllHipHop, refuting the validity of the royalty statement below, which says Jay Z’s Tidal pays twice as much as its biggest competitor.
“This is not one of TIDAL’s royalty statements. For the same period (March 2015) as this purported ‘leaked’ statement, TIDAL paid an average royalty per stream of $0.024-0.028, or double the royalty shown in the statement.”
Basically, they charge that TIDAL actually pays roughly 4-times more than Spotify.
(AllHipHop News) Jay Z promised his new Tidal streaming platform would be more financially beneficial for content owners than other streaming services. As streaming becomes the more preferred method of consuming music, many artists have complained that the revenue sharing from Spotify and others is unfair.
According to Consequence Of Sound, Tidal’s current royalty pay out nearly doubles that of Spotify. An independent label uploaded to Digital News Music what appears to be a March earning report from Tidal royalties. C.O.S. broke down the difference between Tidal and Spotify’s pay out. The site reports:
Spotify claims to pay an average of .72 cents (that’s $0.0072) per stream to rights owners; based on the numbers presented here, TIDAL’s average payout to the label was about 1.2 cents ($0.012). This number comes from taking the average Label Share Net and dividing it by the average Unit Price (bottom of the chart). Note that TIDAL seems to earn an average of $0.014 per stream, but that’s before the company takes their cut.
Jay spoke about Tidal’s revenue sharing with artists during both a Q&A at New York University and on Twitter. The Brooklyn-bred mogul insists his service is about ensuring all people involved in the making of the music get a fair cut of the profits.
“If you have five people paying for music, and ten people consuming it, then the artist starts at -5. We start at 1. There is no free tier and we’ll pay the highest royalty percentage. That’s how we’ll change the industry,” Jay told the NYU crowd.
He later added, “You guys may have seen some of the stats like, Aloe Blacc had a song that was streamed 168 million times and he got paid $4,000. For us, it’s not us standing here saying we’re poor musicians. If you provide a service, you should be compensated for it. And not just artists – just think about the writers and the producers.”
