A Little Knowledge... #5

???BULLETIN NEWS: Tidal shuts 'Direct Artist Payouts' scheme after paying $500k

Tidal launched its 'Direct Artist Payouts' [DAP] feature in November 2021 , as its first step towards a more user-centric system for streaming royalties. The scheme involved re-routing up to 10% of each Tidal HiFi listener's monthly subscription to their most-streamed artist. Now Tidal is shutting down the feature – here's what happened:

• Tidal CEO Jesse Dorogusker explained why in a stream of tweets this week : "We enrolled 70K artists & distributed $500K, far short of our goal." he explained. "The DAP program focused only on a listener’s #1 artist, which left much, much less room for emerging artists to get paid."
• Tidal will focus on its 'Tidal Rising' program, by investing more than "10x what we distributed via DAP" into "backing and celebrating emerging artists through education, custom promotion, and future direct-funding".
• In a separate announcement in January of a partnership with Universal Music Group Dorogusker said that Tidal was "setting aside our current fan-centered royalties investigation to focus on this opportunity for more impact" – a clear pointer, in hindsight, to this week's announcement of the DAP program's closure.
• Tidal Rising now appears to be the focus for finding that impact, and "future direct-funding" – the idea of direct payouts to artists – is still on the table.?
• Labels and distributors will be watching closely and will quickly sound the alarm if they perceive UMG to be getting more than its fair (market) share of slots on the program, given its partnership with Tidal.
• We'll take an optimistic view: Tidal tried something new with its streaming payouts, designed to reward artists. It didn't quite work as well as it hoped, but the streaming economy needs more experiments like this, and more discussion of the results too.

?? Music Ally archive: Tidal

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??? TIME MACHINE: What were we discussing this week 5 and 10 years ago?

The music industry moves really quickly: almost as fast as the British pop stars scrambling to find reasons not to perform at King Charles' coronation . But just how fast does it move? Let's look back to see what we were reporting on five and ten years ago...

February 28, 2013: Shazam has ‘tens of millions’ of weekly active users – we wrote about the successes reported by Shazam, which was being used by “20% of all iPhones in the US". Fast forward ten years and Shazam is now part of Apple, and the data it produces is considered a key tool for marketers and A&R decision making.

March 1, 2018: AI creating music: can we learn to love the algorithms? "Are the new wave of artificial-intelligence startups here to eat musicians’ lunch, or to help them become even more creative?" we asked (rather presciently, if we can toot our horn for a moment). Anyway, five years later, it seems that the answer is for most musicians to treat AI music as a creative partner.?

?? A LITTLE SOMETHING EXTRA...

Our daily Bulletin newsletter is loved by subscribers for its instant industry analysis - but secretly, the part they like most is the ‘A Little Something Extra’ section at the bottom of the email.?

• "HI, BILLY MAYS HERE..." All of the TV infomercials featuring the sadly departed Billy Mays, played simultaneously .
• An outstanding Twitter thread where someone has put an image-generating AI to work on depicting "every American president, but they're all cool and they all sport a mullet ".
• (There are more weird links in The Knowledge every week…)

This is only a glimpse into this week's newsletter – subscribe for FREE to The Knowledge and every Friday it’ll arrive in your inbox, with:

??? The best new platforms in TOOLS, ?? Our utterly vital COUNTRY PROFILES, ?? ??? Some great and/or strange music in SOMETHING 4 THE WEEKEND, A look back in TIME MACHINE, The Music Ally Focus PODCAST, and ?? more links to our favourite unusual stuff in A LITTLE SOMETHING EXTRA.