What Jay Z, Beyonce, Kanye West, Coldplay, Rihanna, & Madonna Won't Tell You about The Tidal Future of Music

Jay Z had a recent meeting with a few of his friends (Beyonce, Kanye West, Coldplay, Rihanna, Madonna, and others) to talk about the future of streaming music and how artists could best profit from the changing 'tidal' of the music biz. The rap artist turned entrepreneur is launching this as a new direction for the music industry from both the artist and commercial perspective, after having purchased the Swedish music streaming company, Aspiro, for $56 Million. 

But he's not the only one: there's Apple Beats with Dr Dre and now Nine Inch Nails frontman, Trent Reznor, offering their streaming service to compete with both Spotify and now Tidal. 

But what does this all mean for the future of music? What does it mean for us as consumers? Will it replace the purchasing of music? 

Here are questions every music fan needs to ask before signing up for Tidal:

1. Where is music going?: What we're seeing is a trend of all data (whether books or music or photos) transitioning from the material to the metaphysical, from matter to zeros and ones. Where will this end? 

2. Do I want to own my music?: This is a question for any form of data--how much of it do you want to own? If it takes a switch for your music library, stored on a barge in the Pacific, to be swiped and cleaned off your account, how is that sustainable? What does it mean to own music in the 21st Century? Such services as Tidal may benefit the big artists, but how does it benefit you?

3. Should I take my $20/month and buy vinyl?: This is a serious question. There are still record players out there for sale, and plenty of vinyl as people junked them for 8-tracks, then cassettes, then CDs etc. This is a time to put together a sweet library of music, if you haven't already. 

4. What's my longevity plan?: What will you want to keep around when you're hitting 50 or 60 or 70? What music do you want to be passing down to your kids and even rocking out to with your grand kids? If this is desirable, then you need to be thinking about your music collection longevity plan. 

5. How does this trend in music translate to other areas of human knowledge?: This trend is everywhere, from film to photo to emails to tweets: our knowledge is growing less secure as more data is stored on software whose obsolescence is more rapid than ever before. We may be the lost generation, that is, future gens will have no record we were even here unless we re-think how we buy, store, share, and access data. 

Give this some real thought. Part of living in this world is having one foot in the now and one foot in the then. We are at a convergence point in our civilization, and few are considering the ramifications of so much cloud activity. When you're buying music, think about it; when you're uploading your next book or mag to a tablet, think about it; when you're sending an email, think about it; when you're capturing your next vacation, think about it. 

Think about this: If the medium is really the message, then what is the trend toward live stream trying to tell us?