Jay-Z's Tidal streaming service is backed by a dream team of musical talent, but will it blend?

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

Having that love of music is the foundation that sets us apart from someone that's a tech company that's selling advertisement or selling hardware.

                  -Jay-Z on Tidal

Responding to the seismic shift in music consumption trends, where subscription-based streaming services are quickly surpassing CD sales and even music downloads, Jay-Z rallied some of music's biggest names to back his recently acquired Tidal music streaming service, which he bought for a cool $56 million.

Touted as the first online distribution service owned and operated by artists, artists like Madonna, Daft Punk, Kanye West, Coldplay, Nikki Minaj, Rhianna, Usher, Deadmau5, Jack White and many others will release their new material on Tidal before making it available on other services such as Spotify, Google Play Music or Apple's upcoming Beats-backed streaming service. 

Aside from access to artist-directed musical firsts, Tidal promises to offer fans high-fidelity audio and video as well as curated content. What's in it for artists who join? They are reportedly getting twice the streaming royalty fees as well as well as co-owner equity in the service. More importantly, they maintain control over how their music is represented and distributed.

What else do we know about Tidal? It follows in the footsteps of Neil Young's high-resolution audio service Pono and offers two subscription models.

The Tidal HiFi subscription offer high resolution audio streams at a lossless 1411 Kbps and costs $29.99 per month.

The Premium service, which offers standard quality audio files costs $14.99 a month. Most competing streaming audio services offer standard quality audio but are cost $9.99 per month.

Both tiers are currently available for a 30-day free trial.

Offering high resolution audio is forward-thinking as the hardware required to play back these types of music files is expensive and still not readily available in the mainstream.

Tidal is available in the following countries. The US, UK, Canada, Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Finland, Belgium, Italy, Singapore, South Africa, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Spain, Portugal, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, France, Austria, Switzerland, Hungary, Turkey, Cyprus, Greece, Malta, Romania, Slovenia, Australia, Germany, Hong Kong and Poland.

 Musicians who are openly supporting Tidal include:

• Jay Z
• Beyoncé
• Kanye West
• Madonna
• Daft Punk 
• Rihanna
• Nicki Minaj
• Coldplay
• Jaden Smith
• Jack White 
• Usher
• Deadmau5
• Diddy
• Calvin Harris
• Alicia Keys
• Arcade Fire
• Jason Aldean

Is Tidal the start of a new direction for music streaming services? Will we see competing camps of artists band together to create another unified service or will exisitng players in the streaming game up their game to give artists more enticing deals?