The competition in music-streaming market is getting higher and higher every day. Recently rapper Jay Z bought Spotify’s competitor Aspiro, a Swedish music streaming company, for $56 million.
Tidal and WiMP are two music streaming services of Aspiro, which at the end of 2014 had around 500,000 subscribers. Besides Jay Z, other popular musicians such as Beyonce, Kanye West, Rihanna, Madonna, Arcade Fire, Calvin Harris, Coldplay, Deadmau5, Jack White, J Cole, Nicki Minaj, and Usher are among Aspiro’s co-owners.
“All appeared at the company’s press conference on Tuesday, and all have equity in Tidal too. The company is pitching itself as “the first artist-owned global music and entertainment platform”, and promising to give shares to other musicians too. It has yet to confirm whether labels will also get stakes in Tidal, as they have with Spotify, or whether it plans to raise money from venture capital investors.” according to this article.
Many popular music services offer different ways of getting music nowadays such as:
Internet radio
Spotify and Pandora are among the most popular internet radio music services. Pandora has over 81 million active listeners that can use the internet radio service for free with ads or pay $5 each month for a premium service that has higher quality audio and no ads.
By using these two services and other similar services with Spotify and Pandora you are able to listen to a variety of songs from plenty of artists all around the world. But you cannot directly choose a specific song or artist by yourself. In order to personalize your internet station you have to be active while listening to it by liking or disliking the songs the radio plays. The songs you like help the service stream only similar songs and song genres while the songs you dislike are most likely to never play again on your internet radio station.
Pay per song
Many artists use pay per song services nowadays. Apple's iTunes, by making it easier for customers to purchase any singles or albums they like has attracted many artists all over the world to release their albums for the first time on iTunes. Google Play and Amazon are the biggest competitors of Apple’s iTunes today as they also use pay per song services and give customers the opportunity to buy any songs and albums they want.
Unlimited listening
By paying a monthly subscription of $10, Spotify, Tidal, Apple’s iTunes, Google Play and Samsung’s milk Music users can listen any songs they like and as many songs as they like through a variety of devices.
Aspiro’s high-quality audio might be the reason why Jay Z has chosen to acquire this specific company to compete with Spotify. High-quality audio demand has been increasing lately and that is why many music streaming companies are working on improving their audio qualities. Apple, with its Beats subscription service for example, is trying to compete with Spotify, which is currently leading the music streaming market today with over 60 million active users worldwide and 15 million paying subscribers.
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