Beyonce Lemonade: Will The Album Have Enough Juice To Boost Tidal Interest?

Beyonce’s new album Lemonade shocked fans with its controversy and the debut of the videos and music on husband Jay Z’s Tidal music streaming service. Beyoncé’s album release nabbed  millions of downloads gaining more members for Tidal. You have to be a Tidal subscriber to enjoy any of its music. Beyoncé’s lemonade inspired fans to sign up for the service but some were unhappy because the visual album is exclusively on Tidal. They cannot be found on popular services Amazon and iTunes. The music was held back from those services during the first few days after the album’s release.

Can music mogul Jay Z compete in the music streaming marketplace? He’s proven himself as a risk taker, businessman, and well – He IS married to Beyonce. That should be enough to sell Tidal, right?

Music lovers have been slow to embrace Tidal, while still favoring Apple Music and Spotify. Tidal, which debuted in early 2015, has about three million subscribers worldwide. Spotify has about 30 million subscribers and Apple Music, which debuted close to the time of Tidal, has about 11 million subscribers.

Beyonce’s controversy over a possible affair between Jay-Z and fashion designer Rachel Roy has been a hot topic that has drawn fans and curious pop culture news addicts to Tidal to download the album and dissect the lyrics to find out is art imitating life or if the album is entertaining fiction.

While many opinions surface about the tone and the message of the album, one fact remains true, there are major players in the music streaming service that have loyal fans who don’t have room on their devices for another streaming service.

More support from Silicon Valley and more of the Beyonce-type exclusives could help Tidal in the long run, but for now the streaming service has to work extra hard to compete in an already saturated streaming market.

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