Rapper Shawn Carter, known as Jay-Z, has taken to Twitter to claim artist-owned music streaming service Tidal is doing fine. Defending against suggestions that the service isn’t as popular as initially anticipated, Jay-Z claims the service has grown to over 770,000 subscribers in the month since the celebrity change of ownership, and that it won’t be as big as other services for quite some time.
“The iTunes Store wasn’t built in a day. It took Spotify nine years to be successful,”the artist writes in tweets spotted by The Verge, before claiming “We are here for the long haul. Please give us a chance to grow and get better.”
Carter points to the equity values of its competitors to show how small the company is, with its $60 million compared to the claimed $390 billion equity value of YouTube, $760 billion of Apple, and $8 billion of Spotify.
Tidal (iOS)
While most of the remaining tweets could be considered fan-pleasing rhetoric, such as “Tidal is where artists can give their fans more without the middlemen,” Jay-Z does also suggest there is some outside interference going on with regards to its public image. “There are many big companies that are spending millions on a smear campaign. We are not anti-anyone, we are pro-artist and fan.”
