With Tidal, Square may give artists more control over the revenue streams they create, offer advances, royalty processing, and more traditional label services (With Tidal Squarepimentelprotocol)

With Tidal Squarepimentelprotocol: The world of streaming music is changing rapidly and the once-popular idea of an artist owning their work has evolved into a much more collaborative process. Artists now have to think about who is providing the music for them, what kind of feedback they can get, and how they will be compensated through streaming services like Tidal.

To get a clearer picture on how this all works, here’s a breakdown on what Square could offer artists with this new service.

What Is Happening With Streaming Music?

Streaming is shifting from an internet-only format to a wide range of services and devices. In the past, artists were able to have their music and video on YouTube, iTunes, and other places. That’s no longer an option for most.

When you think about streaming services like Spotify or Apple Music, it’s easy to get the idea that the artist owns the content once it’s on the service and gets paid when someone downloads or streams it. The reality is, though, that the artist doesn’t really own their recordings or master tapes.

It’s also important to distinguish between record labels and digital music services. Labels have traditionally kept all content exclusive to them, with streaming being no different. For example, if an artist has a deal with Sony Music and they want to stream their music on Spotify, they will not be able to until the label says so. The same essentially goes for Apple Music, Tidal, Soundcloud, and any other streaming entity.

So What Can You Do With Your Music?

Square is trying to give artists a new way to make money and control over their work by letting them process sales from streaming services. Rather than having the whole idea of ownership fall on record labels, Square is giving the power back to artists so they can do things like create a profile and set parameters for what retailer will sell their music. Artists would also have a percentage of the revenue from sales and streaming services.

As mentioned above, Square is trying to make this as easy as possible for artists. Square is also letting them choose how they want to distribute and process their music sales. Artists would be able to choose things like whether they want digital or physical products, what kind of delivery method they want (e.g., download, cloud storage), how much they want to charge for downloads, what kind of adviser package they want, and much more.

This also means that artists can also choose what kind of royalty structure they want. For example, they could have a higher royalty at first and then decrease it as time goes on, just like the record labels seem to do. It’s not clear whether Square will be able to start providing services outside of the music industry (e.g., movies, TV shows, etc.), but since they already have the infrastructure in place to process this in a proper manner, it seems like an obvious next step.

Why Should You Care?

Even though everyone knows that the price of content is going to decrease, it’s still at a high enough level that artists and labels are not making much money. Tidal seems to think that it can change this if they offer artist services like this. Streams are still taking up a lot of space on peoples music libraries and nobody is really complaining about paying for them (yet).