Last month hip hop mogul Jay-Z announced that he would be acquiring Tidal, which for those unfamiliar is a music streaming service that focuses on hi-fidelity streams that focuses on the lossless format, ultimately bringing CD-quality music to music-lovers around the world. Heck, he even got Taylor Swift on board, the artist whom Spotify could not hold onto.
However as it turns out despite Tidal’s dream of providing lossless music streaming to the world, it does not appear to be doing too well. It has been noted that the Tidal music app has dropped out of the top 700 apps on the iPhone in the US and appears to be continuing its way down. It even dropped out of the top 500 apps in the UK on both the iTunes App Store and the Google Play Store charts.
This is compared to competition such as Spotify who is enjoying its number 18 and 11 position on the iTunes App Store and Google Play Store in the US respectively. In the UK, Spotify is doing much better as it is ranked 8th on the iTunes App Store and 6th on Google Play. Granted app downloads does not necessarily mean that the service is tanking, but given that apart from the web player, Tidal is currently only accessible via its smartphone apps.
So to see the apps dropping out of the charts is an indication that not many people are downloading it, which in turn could be interpreted as a lack of interest. Like we said while Tidal’s goal of a lossless music streaming service is commendable, its pricing scheme is probably one of the bigger factors as to why listeners aren’t flocking to it at the moment.