Tidal is the new digital music platform on the scene, owned by a hand full of A list music artists, and their claim was that since it was artist owned, they were going to pay artist better than the other platforms. Due to the turn around time on receiving payments for music streams, I'm just now seeing the numbers on what the actual payout rate is. First, let's see what's been posted about Tidal...
Photo Shoots, Shoot outs, and a tick...
Recently Kurt and I had a photo shoot since we were running out of images to get us through the Year of the Groove. It's always kind of funny to me when, from the outside looking in, my life might seem a little extra glamorous for a day. I always feel like I need to make clear to people that it is only a mirage. And it's not even that people around me think my life is glamorous, because all they need to do is come to my house and see that my recycling is piling up, I only fold my laundry once a season, and nothing more than 12" back in my fridge is probably safe for human consumption. But online, it's so easy to filter what gets posted, and only allow the majority of acquaintances to get a glimpse of the highlights. [Don't we all do this? This is why we should never compare ourselves to others.]
When others give away what we worked so hard on...
One of the most frustrating and disheartening parts of releasing music in today's digital music marketplace is when perfect strangers take it upon themselves to freely give away the music that we have worked so hard on, and paid so much to create, thus discouraging the few remaining buyers from actually properly purchasing our work. After releasing our first record in 2007, one day I set up a Google alert so that any time a website was found with "Worldwide Groove Corporation" or "Chillodesiac" in the page contents, we would get an email with a link. Little did I know that within the next week I would get dozens of email alerts directing me to blogs where people [who make a habit of doing this regularly] had uploaded our album artwork and all of the music into downloadable files so people could just help themselves to our work without even connecting with or compensating us.