Bob O'Donnell

About the Author Bob O'Donnell

Bob O’Donnell is the founder and chief analyst of TECHnalysis Research, LLC a technology consulting and market research firm that provides strategic consulting and market research services to the technology industry and professional financial community. You can follow him on Twitter @bobodtech.

Apple Inc, Pandora Media Inc, Sony Corp (ADR); Riding The High-Res Tidal Wave


 

 

 

 

 

 

Arguably one of the more interesting aspects of the announcement was the bringing together of numerous high-profile artists not only to support the service but to participate in its ownership. A-List musicians including Alicia Keys, Daft Punk, Kanye West, Usher, Deadmaus, Madonna, Rihanna, Chris Martin of ColdPlay and Jay Z's wife Beyonce, among many others, were introduced as co-owners of the service. Of course, it's somewhat easy to scoff at the notion of an artist-owned entity, but it's hard to deny that it was an impressive turnout.

More importantly, the concept of a musician-owned business distributing the work of artists is something that could definitely appeal to a relatively wide range of other musicians. Certainly, Jay-Z is counting on that intra-industry appeal. His announced intentions of getting exclusive early releases from numerous major artists is going to be dependent on other artists' willingness to join his experiment. Given his reported influence and reach in the music business, he might just be able to pull off a compelling set of content.

As has been discussed elsewhere, there does seem to be a growing sense among musical artists that streaming services are not paying them what they feel are fair rates. As a result, regardless of how these artists (or you and I) feel about Jay-Z or the significantly smaller size of the Tidal audience, that could prove to be a compelling difference in getting additional artists to come aboard.

Another compelling difference in the Tidal service is the option of high-resolution audio streaming. While this won't be a mainstream option, the ability to hear music in uncompressed CD quality is something that does matter to some people – especially musicians. As a group, musicians are much more particular about music formats and the ability to offer their music in high resolution on Tidal could prove to be a lot more compelling to artists than many people realize.

In addition, there are a lot of consumers who care about higher music quality. There has been a renaissance of interest in higher-quality over-the-ear headphones among many young music listeners. Also, the audiophile crowd – while not huge – does tend to come from higher income brackets and is willing to spend money both on listening equipment and content. Companies like Pono and Sony Corp (ADR) (NYSE:SNE), in fact, have started to build a business catering to the FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec – a high resolution audio format) crowd. In addition to high-resolution audio players, Sony has even built a set of high-resolution audio headphones with a digital input that can take full advantage of the Tidal high-resolution offering.

Admittedly, there's a great deal of controversy around the real benefits of high-resolution audio with several reviews from respected sites or publications reporting that they couldn't tell the difference between compressed and uncompressed source material. Scientifically, a waveform comparison between compressed and uncompressed music will show differences, but listening to audio is highly subjective and therefore subject to much more debate.

One key factor is that several of the recent comparisons used higher quality compressed formats and not the lower 128kbps standard that likely form the vast majority of most people's music libraries. I'd argue that a wider audience of people probably can hear the difference between 128kbps files and the uncompressed audio found on hi-res audio players and the Tidal service. Ultimately, however, it's almost completely dependent on the quality of the entire listening chain – particularly the speakers or headphones.

Getting a music service to succeed is going to take more than just compiling a large musical library from an influential set of artists and offering unique time-limited exclusives for some of that content (although doing so will certainly help). In addition, offering high-resolution formats will only appeal to a certain group of consumers. Nevertheless, combining the convenience of streaming with the quality of uncompressed audio is going to be a dream come true for many hard-core music fans. It's certainly a wave that bears watching.

Disclaimer: Some of the author's clients are vendors in the tech industry.

 

 

 

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