Jay-Z Selling Tidal
Heard a really great clubhouse room yesterday called “Fake Music Industry People” It was about Jay-Z selling Tidal, as well as a few comments on Timbaland and Swizz Beatz selling Verzuz. All three are brilliant businessmen but people on the call had reservations about their intent.
Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co founder who runs the mobile payments company Square, acquired a majority stake Tidal for $297 Million.
Per the terms of the deal co-owners of Tidal; Beyonce, Madonna and Rihanna, all savvy business entertainers, get to retain their stakes in the company as shareholders. Jay-Z will be on Square’s board of directors.
A lot of the callers were assessing how unfortunate is that Black people lead us into participating in certain things, like Jay-Z asking us to join Tidal financially and then we find out that they sold their shares off. They were saying that Jay-Z mislead the community into thinking that he actually owned Tidal.
I never recall him saying that during the video presention. I recall him saying it was OUR company but I’m quite sure he was talking about the artists some of whom were not black like Madonna.
Other callers chimed in and said Jay-Z was simply the face of Tidal and that he never made a promise to the black community about Tidal being black honed.
It was very speculative that Jay-Z owned Tidal but it was revealed almost at the beginning that he was not the owner and that he was the face of the company and he owned a percentage.
Jay-Z Talks about Cannibus Brand and Helping Black Entreprneurs
One caller pointed something out that was actually pretty important, he said just like a lot of black people participated because of Jay-Z there were a lot of other people who refused to participate because of Jay-Z, and many of the other DSPs did not have a face with a product like Tidal and pay much less to creatives. The company was always about paying the artists a fairer share of their streaming earnings.
Simply put, Jay Z used his influence to help build the brand, and then he sold his shares of it that’s pretty much how business works. Oprah did it with Weight Watchers and Timbaland and Swizz did it with Verzuz. That’s not a crime, or a betrayal it’s smart business.
Build it sell it. In the Black community, we tend to have the Dry Cleaner mentality about a business run it until you die. There is no wealth in that just poor HEALTH. Build it SELL it. In addition, we don’t own anything because we don’t do ENOUGH business NOT because we don’t hold on to what we have.
