New music service owned by artists: Tidal

Tidal is one of the new players in the crowded space of music streaming service. And it made the news recently because of ownership changes. Tidal is now owned by a group of artists led by the financially (and musically?) successful Jay-Z. It claims to pay more royalty to artists than other services. For some reason it is getting quite a few backslashes. For example, one Bob Leftsez complained "We’ve got uber-rich artists complaining they’re just not making enough" which is refuted by this article. Musicians are NOT supposed to be poor, are they? And I just read the criticism mentioned in the Wikipedia about the service being too expensive ($19.99 for hi-resolution streaming. $9.99 for regular. No free option) One Marina and the Diamonds claimed that $240 a year is NOT a positive way for everyone to consume music. Oh well, that's about the price of 16 CDs (or 24 albums in MP3) Is that what artists expect any serious fans of music to spend on new music per year?

I think the biggest challenge for them though is to compete with all these other free or paid services and get enough subscribers to sustain the business. Exclusive content might help but it's just one factor. I have listened to Rhapsody for about 10 years WITHOUT the likes of Led Zeppelin, AC/DC or Beatles available and I still have plenty of good music to listen to. To be honest, if I cannot afford Rhapsody anymore, I would count on free services offered by all these online radio and Pandora. Their another selling point was hi-res streaming. I read someone conducted test and found that a lot of listener cannot distinguish between hi-res and "regular" files because the latter were usually encoded in bit rates > 160 these days, which is not exactly lo-res.