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Streaming tears of laughter as Jay-Z (Tidal) waves goodbye to $56m

Where's Kanye when you need him?

No success for Alicia Keys

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Why was Alicia Keys making this speech about the revolutionisationingcy of music? Cast your mind back to 2004 when Apple launched the iTunes Store in Europe. I was there for the official launch in London. Performing live on stage that day – and causing no end of suffering among the audience – was one Alicia Keys, who wanted us to know that iTunes was the last word in digital music downloads.

For several years afterwards, if you ran a web search for the expression “insane hooting”, my review of her performance at the launch event came top of the search results.

Anyway, it’s clear that this woman has form when it comes to bullshitting the music-buying public. And it says volumes about Tidal that the rest of the airhead owners chose her to speak on their behalf because she was the smartest person on the stage.

This was confirmed by the various contributions from the others, in most cases meaningless bleatings about themselves, and in one spectacular instance, Madonna lifting her leg to wee against the table leg while signing the contract. Kanye West’s signature appeared to be an ‘X’.

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I was astonished that self-aggrandising mega-div Will.I.Am was not there rubbing perinea with the rest of these arseholes. Maybe I have misjudged the fellow.

Not wanting to piss on the Tidal parade – not least because Madonna has already done so – I do wonder whether these shitty pop artists (what the hell was Jack White doing there?) were persuaded to invest in the service after watching from the sidelines as Dr Dre and his mate pocketed $3bn for a graphic equaliser setting, a bunch of links and a pair of headphones designed to look as if they were glued together out of a squeezy bottle by a Blue Peter presenter.

It remains to be seen whether music streaming will be as profitable as music downloads. It also remains to be seen whether lesser-known artists, especially those without a record contract, will feature on Tidal at all, let alone earn more money from it than they might from other services.

Besides, do fans of the specific crackpot artists who own Tidal care that much about CD-quality audio? As one studio engineer at the IEEE Blumlein Milestone event pointed out, when his daughter gets home after school, she switches her mobile phone to play mode and drops it into a glass tumbler to amplify the sound. If that’s the kind of hi-fi preferred by Kanye fans, what’s the point?

Perhaps the name Tidal is itself prophetic. Unless he resells it quick, I suspect Jay-Z may eventually have to (tidal) wave goodbye to his $56m.

Worse for them, I hear that good old CD is experiencing something of a resurgence, while the number of gramophone discs being pressed in the UK daily is increasing relentlessly – still employing Blumlein’s patented stereo groove system, of course, some 84 years after he thought of it.

Now that’s genius. Alicia Keys he ain’t. ®

Alistair DabbsAlistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. Not being an audiophile, he can’t tell you whether listening to Jay-Z at 320Kbit/sec is any better than, say, putting it in a biscuit tin and burying it six feet underground. He prefers CD for the sole reason of being able to read sleeve notes and lyrics, albeit with a magnifying glass.

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