On Monday, Jay-Z and Jack Dorsey held a half-hour conference on Twitter Spaces that partly outlined the TIDAL music platform’s future. Jack Dorsey-owned Square recently acquired TIDAL in a deal that keeps Jay-Z on board.
Dorsey started by outlining how the pair started the acquisition talks.
“We started talking a year ago now and saw so many parallels. I’d tell you stories about our work around helping small businesses — most of the financial industry is working against them. And in conversation, it just became apparent that there were so many parallels in spirit because of what a musician and a small business are going through.
“What dawned on me was how weak some of the toolsets are for artists, with analytics and data, to understand what they’re doing and help them inform their decisions, especially considering other revenue streams like merchandise and touring, and NFTs. It felt a little weird on the surface, but when you delve down, there’s a lot in common.”
In an online gathering that brought music fans and artists together, Jack Dorsey revealed that TIDAL would become a creative and business platform for musicians. “When Jay and I had our initial conversations, the biggest opportunity we saw was the tools — artists have very little access to data, information, analytics.
There’s not enough direct connection to those tools, and the tool spaces are rather weak in comparison to other industries. So we want to add commerce and make it easy to collaborate and publish and take away all the friction points that most artists have to deal with.”
Dorsey concluded, “Any tools that we build, the intention is that wherever an artist wants to go with them, they go. We’re not interested in creating a closed ecosystem. We’re going to focus on those tools to make the artist shine and give them what they need to thrive in every way.”