Business News Digital

WiMP and Tidal subscriber figures published as part of takeover

By | Published on Tuesday 10 February 2015

Tidal

The planned purchase of Scandinavian streaming music company Aspiro – which operates the WiMP and Tidal services – has led to a stats fest because Swedish regulations say the company must publish user-figures as part of the takeover process (although the WiMP firm is Norwegian, parent company Aspiro is based in Sweden).

The stats provide figures as of 31 Jan this year and last, and break down the numbers according to service and subscription type.

So we know that 71,000 people were signed up to the main WiMP premium service as of last month, 24,000 to its high-quality audio option, and 17,000 to its stand-alone high-def set up Tidal (the Tidal figure is slightly higher than that being touted last week, seemingly because the earlier mooted stat was for December 2014 and a few thousand more sign-ups occurred last month).

But, illustrating just how important tel co and similar partnerships are for streaming services looking to sign-up customers, by far the biggest subscriber numbers are those secured “through partners”. Indeed, this side of the business slipped during 2014, from 482,000 users to 391,000, resulting in a fall in overall subscriber base from 566,000 to 503,000.

For all the hype around high quality audio streaming as we head into 2015, these figures do suggest that paying double for higher quality sound remains a niche offer, given that WiMP was the first to dabble in this space in the streaming domain.

As previously reported, the Jay-Z controlled Project Panther Bidco is currently in the process of trying to acquire Aspiro, and looks likely to succeed.



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