This weekend, Tidal is dropping yet another chapter in a series of supermassive game-changing exclusives.
Jay Z. Live in New York City. Two nights only. Playing b-sides and rarities from his back catalogue, which has seen maybe two good albums since 2003.
There are two ways to watch this obsolete rapper play his rustiest material and — surprise! — they both involve Tidal. You can stream the performance or, if you live in New York City, you can simply create a Tidal playlist to be entered to win a ticket.
Tidal has been shaking the Earth off its axis since March, when more than a dozen of the world’s richest musicians banded together to suggest you pay them mo– ahem, to suggest you help them “forever change the course of music history.” Oh, how far we’ve come.
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In the wake of that announcement, Tidal fell out of the App Store’s top 700 apps, but climbed to the 664th spot when news broke that Jay Z and Beyonce would release a joint album on the service. Meanwhile, Kanye West, one of Tidal’s 16 super-rich co-owners, quietly deleted all references to the service on his Twitter.
Then Beyonce, Tidal co-owner with a net worth of $400 million, commemorated her seventh wedding anniversary by releasing a ballad and accompanying home video. It was disseminated across the Internet almost immediately because “exclusive content” is hard to police and runs counter to the idea of pop ubiquity.
Then Tidal streamed a live acoustic show from Jack White in North Dakota. The occasion? He hadn’t been there yet. White, a millionaire co-owner of Tidal, doesn’t own a mobile phone and is very familiar with gouging customers with artificially limited supply.
After changing music history (by basically charging more money to make it less accessible), Tidal could have taken the rest of the year off. But they just kept giving: Prince, a man who once sued 22 fans at $1 million apiece for the crime of recording audio at Prince shows, streamed a live show in Baltimore for free. Prince is not a co-owner at Tidal, but he clearly shares their brand of forward thinking.
Tonight, once again, will be a Tidal exclusive you’ll recall for your children’s children: an intimate guided journey through the least-known material of a guy whose music last mattered in 2007.
Will you please, please, please give Tidal “a chance to grow and get better“?
