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Tidal running out of cash fast, claims new report

By | Published on Thursday 14 December 2017

Tidal

Tidal has denied claims that it only has enough money to stay afloat for another six months. Which isn’t surprising. Partly because a company would always deny such things, plus the claims of imminent demise do seem to be mainly based on a passing comment made earlier this year. Although other reports say that the streaming service reckons it’ll be profitable by the middle of next year. Which, if true, seems ludicrously ambitious.

New claims of financial woes at Jay-Z’s streaming service come from a report in Norwegian newspaper Dagens Næringsliv. The Norwegian press still take a particular interest in all things Tidal, the service having grown out of Norway-based digital music set up WiMP. The paper reckons that the company lost about $44 million last year, leaving it with just enough cash to keep it going until early summer 2018.

The claim is seemingly based on a comment made by the president of the sports side of Jay-Z’s Roc Nation business – Juan Perez – back in January, after Sprint took a 33% stake in the streaming service. He said at the time that the deal gave Tidal “sufficient working capital for the next twelve to eighteen months”.

Following the Dagens Næringsliv report, Tidal denied that it’s on the rocks, saying in a statement that: “We have experienced negative stories about Tidal since its inception and we have done nothing but grow the business each year”.

The company is known to have a much smaller userbase than rivals Spotify and Apple Music. It has not publicly announced any figures since 2016, when it claimed to have three million users – although some analysts have claimed that this included people on free trials, with actual paying users making up only a portion of that number.

That paying userbase could take a hit in the new year when a partnership with Norwegian telco Telenor ends in January. This is expected to knock around 100,000 users off Tidal’s books, according to Dagens Næringsliv.



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