“We are in the process of launching initiatives that we’ve been working on for months. The first two are Tidal X and Tidal Rising and the next will be Tidal Discovery, so we’re all very excited about that.”
Tidal X
Tidal X is the service’s differentiator. It encompasses private concerts (like the J. Cole concert this weekend for those who stream him the most), and other direct artist access points.
Most recently some Tidal users have received personal phone calls from Jay Z and other stars. Tidal X is the name that refers to the star-power type of treatment Tidal can provide to get more fans on board and keep the existing ones excited about using it.
Tidal Rising
Tidal Rising is about emerging artist awareness and is in the process of rolling out on Android, iOS, and the Web. It will highlight smaller and independent artists. There will be dedicated places throughout the service for indie artists, where the majority of Tidal users will have a chance to see and hear them. As an example, Lili K has been one of the first Tidal Rising artists.
Tidal Discovery
Some of the features not yet released are the most interesting, however. Tidal Discovery will make it more seamless for artists to upload their music and have more and better control over how easy it is for consumers to listen quickly.
“When it comes to the distribution of music, I want to get a point where there are no blockades for artists in order to be able to easily do that for themselves,” Schlogel said.
Typically artists have to go through third-party services to get their music on to streaming services.
There’s also the aspect of listening data. Typically distributors retain 100% of the data generated from user’s listening, including locations and email addresses. Tidal will soon have an artist dashboard where this type of data is available to all artists.
“It’s built and we’re slowly rolling this out so that more and more artists can get access,” said Schlogel. “The end game being that we want everyone to be able to self upload their own music and then track it very intuitively through this artist dashboard.”
Tidal has been publicly dinged for not doing more for independent artists, but it’s also doing things other streaming music services are not. For example, instead of the industry standard of paying indie labels 55% and majors 60%, Tidal is paying record labels 62.5% across the board regardless of size.
“I think indie artists who come on to Tidal through their label can at least have the piece of mind that their label is not being paid less of a percentage just by virtue of being indie,” Schlogel explained.
After paying labels and publishers about 75% of revenue, that leaves 25% to pay employees, hosting fees, and other bills. Right now, Tidal is actually operating in negative profits—I was told.
It’s easy to be skeptical that these moves are in response to the public backlash of super-rich artists having a financial stake in the streaming service, but realistically it’s hard to imagine it’d even be possible to get these services together this quickly. Artist dashboards for data analysis are the type of technical challenges that just take time.
Beats Music, for instance, will have been in the works for around two and a half years when Apple re-launches it in a few months as its own in-house offering.
Even though it’s an easy target right now, Tidal does seem to be trying to deliver on artist-forward offerings. It will just take time for the service to develop itself.
As long as it can hold of the critics long enough to show what it’s been working on behind closed doors, it might actually prove to be the refuge a lot of artists have been looking for in the digital music world.
" bullshyt nikkas keep throwin around.
for a camel who wouldn't even spit on you if you were on fire. 
