App Store Analytics Reveal Tidal's Struggles May Soon Be Over
May 11, 2016
Tidal is dead.
At least that’s the popular opinion. Publications ranging from Billboard Magazine to the International Business Times to Esquire have declared it a massive failure, and according to one industry survey, 71 percent of top music executives think the streaming service will be nonexistent within a year.
And you really can’t blame them. Main competitors Spotify and Pandora are consistently ranked within the top 20 on both Google Play and the App Store, and Tidal has languished mostly outside the top 100 since its launch in 2015. Nothing, from free-trial subscriptions to the exclusive release of the highly anticipated Kanye West album “Life of Pablo,” has made a sustained impact on the charts.
Well, until Beyoncé came along anyway.
On April 23, the singer released her latest album, “Lemonade,” exclusively on Tidal. Users took notice, and as expected, there was a surge in downloads in the immediate aftermath of the album drop (about 4x over the number of downloads the days prior). But that’s not what’s really interesting.
You see, when it comes to media apps, more often than not Apptopia app download data shows a spike in downloads around the release of new content (i.e., a new season of "Orange is the New Black" coming to Neflix) and then a return to the same daily download rate a day or two later. Rarely is there a significant, sustained impact on the average daily download rate. However, with Tidal, the daily download rate rose by 80 percent on the App Store in the days following the release of “Lemonade” and has remained there since. The increase in downloads was even more dramatic on Google Play, with daily download rates peaking at more than 177 percent higher than those prior to April 23. (However, it must be noted there has been significant variance in daily downloads in Google Play the days following the album's release, and the numbers have yet to hit a reliable plateau as they did on iOS.)
For now, Tidal is still (as of 5/9) ranked at 185 in the App Store and 191 in Google Play, but the Apptopia Breakout Predictor is predicting the streaming app has an 87 percent chance to crack the top 100—and stay there.
What may help the company’s efforts is Radiohead, who on Sunday May 8 spurned Spotify to release the band’s latest album on Tidal and Apple Music. And while it’s true that the alt-rock band doesn’t carry the same cache as Beyoncé, they still have a sizeable audience that may flock towards Tidal in the coming days and weeks.
Of course, a lot still remains to be seen. The popularity of “Lemonade” may prove short-lived, or competitors like Spotify might recoup some missed content. But it’s obvious that the predictions of the death of Tidal might have been a little too hasty.
