Jay Z’s Tidal to launch in Australia by June

European high fidelity streaming service Tidal, which was recently acquired by Jay Z, will launch in Australia by June, it announced overnight.

Australia will be part of its latest roll-out, which includes Hong Kong, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Germany and Poland.

Tidal was set up as a global company to be available in 50 countries. It is already live in the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Finland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Italy, South Africa, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Singapore, Denmark, Spain, Portugal, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, France, Austria, Switzerland, Hungary, Turkey, Sweden, Romania, Slovenia, Greece, Cyprus and Malta.

Jay Z bought Tidal’s parent company Aspiro for US$56 million. Since then, he’s worked, with its CEO Andy Chen, to give it more of a global presence and increase its subscriber base. Earlier this week, he amalgamated Tidal with Aspiro’s other music streaming services WiMP under the Tidal name.

Tidal has over 25 million tracks and 75,000 music videos in lossless (CD quality) FLAC quality, as well as editorial curation and other features. It has partnerships with over 30 audio brands, the latest being Sonos.

It has only 17,000 subscribers as of December 2014. But it is already attracting some major name endorsees with its high level audio, no free tier and promises of double a return to artists. Taylor Swift is allowing her material (except the current 1989 album) to be streamed on Tidal.

So why did Swift last year pull her material last November from Spotify, which has 15 million paid subscribers and 60 million active users? Because, she said, Spotify’s free tier prevents artists like her from being properly compensated.

And why would Swift then opt for a streaming service which has far less subscribers and costs twice as much as Spotify, at US$20 a month? Because in the changing mood of the music industry, premium consumer charges to compensate copyright holders are where it’s all heading to effectively monetising the streaming phenomenon. Tidal’s Chen’s mantra – “We think people should pay for all their music” – is the new soundtrack.

Tidal’s expansion comes at a time when consumers are moving to high level audio. Tidal’s quality is far superior to those by Spotify, Rdio and Beats Music. When the era of the iPod emerged, music fans were happy to lose some of the audio quality of tracks for volume in "lossy" compression formats like MP3 or AAC to keep the size of the files down. Now that thinking is shifting, and they (or some of them at least) are happy to pay extra to get the best.