In case you hadn’t heard, Jay-Z is this week launching (relaunching) the Tidal music service he recently acquired along with a lot of help from industry friends. The company is hoping its model is innovative and helps artists earn more, but its UI for the web app appears to be a shameless copy of Spotify, as you can see in the comparison screenshot: Tidal above, Spotify below.
The goal for Tidal, according to interviews with Jay-Z this week in Billboard and elsewhere, is essentially a value proposition for artists that feel they aren’t getting a fair share of revenues through streaming services like Spotify and Apple’s Beats — an issue that has picked up more attention recently when Taylor Swift decided to pull her music from Spotify. Swift’s music will be available on Tidal.
Now someone just needs to remind Jay-Z that UI designers are artists too.
It sure looks a lot like Tidal will be one of Apple’s biggest competitors for Beats and Apple’s upcoming revamped music service. In interviews this week promoting the launch of Tidal, Jay-Z claimed that Jimmy Iovine, the record industry bigwig and Beats cofounder, was attempting to lure away top-selling artists to join Apple’s upcoming service.
(Image via @de)
