

The TIDAL team is boldly chasing - in their own self-important way - the idea that streaming services could potentially replace labels, and artists could take control of their own destiny. To date, these extra perks have only managed to get user ranks up to a fourth of Spotify’s user count - $15 million to Spotify’s $75 million. Even if it had gone off perfectly - and despite the desirable Beats 1 programming - it takes quite a while to sell people on a new subscription service. Also, there was the promise of being able to seamlessly integrate your own iTunes library, and upload music easily to the database.īut there proved to be lots of problems involved with the former merger, in particular. There was OVO Radio, and Drake song premieres. Dre exclusively previewed his album there, and then launched it exclusively on Apple Music. There was also the formidable promise of expansion of the definition of a streaming site: lots of original, Beats 1 Radio content. But more than a lot of significant expansion in what our favorite streaming services were able to do or offer - either for users or for artists - we just saw more streaming services creeping in, most notably Apple Music, which seemed like it might be capable of displacing Spotify’s reign of power.

Another year, another big step for streaming services taking over the world, or perhaps in the macro, for at-a-click, on-demand everything.
