Kanye Gets Tidal To Extend Trial Period

If you want to listen to Kanye West's new album The Life of Pablo, there's only one place online and that's Tidal. The problem is that after the 30 day trial period, you have to start to pay for the service, either at the $9.95 per month premium rate, or the more spendy $19.95 per month rate for the CD quality Tidal Hi-Fi.

Fearful of losing a chance at upselling trial subscribers that signed on just to listen to the album who's time has run out, Tidal has extended it's free trial period by 30 days.

There are probably a couple of reasons for this. First, Tidal screwed up Kanye's TLOP launch by not reporting it's numbers to Billboard, resulting in the album not even charting when it was released. Whether this was because the numbers might have been embarrassingly low, or just a human error hasn't been determined.

The second reasons might be that Tidal owner Jay-Z is reportedly looking for either a partner in the platform, or a straight buy-out. Any subscriber attrition, even those on free tier, looks bad, so it's in the company's best interest to bite the bullet and add another free month rather than have the numbers decrease.

One interesting thing is that Kanye and his producers keeps changing TLOP even after it's been released, which may be the wave of the future in terms of production. Hit the release deadline and perfect it later in the form of updates may become the norm before you know it.

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Only 1 In 4 Spotify Users Pay

Spotify is growing and it now has more than 60 million subscribers, but how many of those actually pay? It turns out that about 25% are paying subscribers, bringing the figure to around 15 million, which was a substantial increase over the previous year. What's more, that's still a lot better than Pandora, which runs at about a 10 to 1 paying subscriber ratio.

That said, Spotify has been running discounted deals for the better part of that time period, so basically no one is paying "retail" for their subscription. The big question is, what will happen when the prices go back to normal?

The other major looming question is, what will happen when Apple's Beats service is reloaded and launched this year, along with YouTube's Music Key? Will the increased competition stunt Spotify's growth?

If I had to wager on it, I'd say that all of those concerns will factor into a tougher year for the platform in 2015.

Here's a infographic from Statista that shows Spotify's recent growth.

You will find more statistics at Statista