Square are reportedly looking to aquire TIDAL from Jay-Z
An anonymous source told Bloomberg, Jay-Z is in talks with Jack Dorsey, CEO of financial payments company Square, for a potential buyout.
Founder and CEO of Square as well as co-founder and CEO of Twitter, and ex-board member at Walt Disney Co., Jack Dorsey has supposedly been in talks Jay-Z over a potential purchase of high-fidelity music streaming service TIDAL. While Square has been booming in recent years with two core products Square Seller and Cash App, TIDAL is thought to be struggling against competitors such as Spotify and Apple Music.
TIDAL was acquired by Jay-Z in 2015 for $56 million and owned by many other high-profile artists such as Beyoncé, Alicia Keys, Coldplay, Madonna and Rihanna. Since soon after its launch, TIDAL’s subscriber numbers have been largely unknown, with many speculating this is due to small subscriber numbers. During the early days, Jay-Z and many other artists hosted their music exclusively on TIDAL, however since then, many artists came back to Spotify and other streaming services, with Jay-Z himself putting his songs back on Spotify last year, backing up reports of potential struggles for TIDAL.
The talks between Dorsey and Jay-Z remain private with neither company making any comment, however the two have met multiple times during the pandemic. They were spotted together by TMZ back in August and again more recently by the Daily Mail in November. The reports from the unnamed reporter stresses these are just talks and nothing is set in stone.
Today, TIDAL boasts an impressive 70+ million songs available for streaming, which is up there with industry leaders Apple Music. TIDAL still remains one of the few ways to streaming lossless hi-fi music.